Toy blocks lying around the area...

(click picture to see the enlarged version)

For Week 02, Lab 01, Exercise 01. Who left those toy blocks here?

Process
For the cylinder, the square, and the cuboid, the Maya primitives were used to create those simple toy blocks. Then a bevel was applied so that their edges do not look too sharp. Since these are toy blocks they shouldn't have sharp edges that can accidentally cut and injure people.

For the triangular block, the cuboid was duplicated, and with the bevel removed for the duplicated so that we can do additional operations on it. The cuboid was cut into two, using the Split Polygon tool and cutting each faces manually. Then, the two ends of the vertices were moved down, and we have our triangular block! The bevel was applied back to the model.

For our final block (which I like to call it the "bridge" block), the triangular block was duplicated, and as usual, the bevel was removed. After that, at the centre of the block, I placed a cylinder there, to indicate that I want to make a semi-circular hole on the block.

When I placed the cylinder on the proper position (with some help from the Align tool), I selected the triangular block first, then add the cylinder to the selection. The ordering of selection here was kind of important, since we all know that a-b =/= b-a. I wanted to do a boolean difference here which applied the same concept, so to cut the triangular block using the cylinder, I have to select it in the correct order.

Once the selection was done, I told Maya to do a Boolean Difference. Volia! The triangular block now has a hole at the bottom. I proceed in adding bevel to finish the final product.

Reflection

Compared to the robot this was a rather simple work because it only involves a few primitives. With the help of the Hide tool to temporary hide objects that I have already completed and not currently working on, I was able to better concentrate on working on my current toy block.

The Bevel tool was an important tool to learn in my opinion because in the real world, most of the objects do not have sharp edges (unless they are intentionally made to have sharp edges, such as the blade of the scissors). Even for objects that appear to have sharp edges, upon close look, they actually have a bevel-like kind of edges more than a sharp edge. So therefore, when modelling, I will try to use bevel more often so that the edges does not end up becoming too sharp, and end up making the objects look unrealistic.

In this lesson, I also learnt about using the boolean differences. There are actually two more boolean functions, which are boolean union and boolean intersection. Boolean union merges the polygons of the two objects together, while boolean intersection only leaves behind the areas of the two objects where there is intersection. I find these boolean functions to be extremely useful for creating unusually shaped objects, especially the boolean difference which allow me to make some holes onto the object being applied on.