Gears

One of the most effective and crucial components of moving machineries... the gears!

(click picture to see the enlarged version)

Process
Firstly, a pipe primitive with several subdivisions were made. The number of subdivisions on the outer and inner ring of the pipe is the number of teeth x 2 (so in this case it is 16x2 = 32).

I then select all of the faces that are potential areas to create the teeth for the gear, use the Extrude tool, and extrude out the faces to create my teeth for the gear.

Reflection
The video tutorial that accompanied with the lab taught us about the different possible ways of selecting polygons. Firstly, polygons can be set to get selected when the mouse is clicked on the centre part of the face, or just by clicking any part of the face. I prefer the latter, which is the default method, since selecting a bigger area is much more easier than selecting a small area.

The video tutorial also covers the problem of accidentally selecting polygons that are behind the polygons in front. This can be solved by enabling "backface culling" in Maya preferences, so that polygons behind does not get selected. I like the backface culling feature, but sometimes disabling backface culling also has its uses when selecting vertices, so I leave it off by default.

The Extrude tool was also taught in this exercise. Would be useful in the future when I want to create surfaces that pops out. It is also another way for me to create holes for my objects.

Finally, the video tutorial also covered selecting multiple faces with the "Shift" key (that have selection toggling), and the "Ctrl" key (that does NOT have selection toggling). This is extremely useful for me since having the ability to select multiple faces speeds up the modelling process.