Maya Foundations

Jean-Marc Gauthier All Rights Reserved Fall 2004

This tutorial shows you how to get around in Maya by creating a textured
box from a polygonal primitive.

Create polygonal cube. Select Create > Polygonal Primitives > Cube. Scale
the cube.
1- Extrude one face of the cube. In Component mode, select the front face of
the cube. Edit polygons > Extrude Face.
Please following illustration showing how to select one face of the
cube.
2- Re-edit history of manipulation tools like having second thoughts about
what you modeled. You can edit the “extrude” history.

3- Assign texture. Go to Windows > Rendering Editor > Hypershade

panel. Press space bar, inside the toolbox turn on Shading > Smooth
Shade Selected and Shading > Hardware texturing. Now we create
Blinn materials for each face of the cube. Step 4: In Hypershade,
doubleclick on Blinn or Lambert. Step 5: in Hypershade > Work Area,
click on the shader’s icon. Step 6: you can edit the shader’s attributes in
the Attributes Editor.
The following illustration shows how to Assign the new material to a face of
the cube of your choice.
Repeat the same process for all the faces inside the cube. Please note that
we will use the inside of the cube with interactive textures for your next
assignment.
4- Map the color attribute with a 2d texture file. Create the texture.
Apply the texture to a face of the cube. Please note that you need to change
the Shading settings in order to make the texture visible.
In this example we extrude again the back face inside the cube in order to
create the front façade of the cube.
 5- Smooth the cube.

You can select either the object in Object mode, select the object (cube
turns with green edges. Select Polygons > smooth.
Please note that by default Maya turns backface culling off. In this case,
Maya lets you select only the faces ( also called polygons) of the object
located in front of the camera or the faces of object visible by the camera.

Sometimes you may want to select all faces of an object. In this case, go to
Display > Custom Polygon Display > and turn Backface Culling =
on

6- You can use UV maps in order to control how to project and how to size
the texture on the 3D model. Click on the object with RMB and select
Face. Select the faces of the object that you want to texture or the faces
already textured that you want to edit. Hold the shift key in order to add
faces to the selection
7- Create planar mapping Edit polygons > Texture > Planar Mapping.
Position the planar projection.
8- Select Window > UV Texture Editor. Drag the yellow and green arrows,
rotate the mesh and play with the positions of the texture. See the updated
texture in the 3D view window.
9- Save scene. Finish the model. Delete history Edit > Delete by type >
History.
10- File > Save Scene as