Subtitles of the Movie

Now that we've created our modeling template, we're ready to begin box modeling our rifle. Before we do, however, I'd like to show you a demonstration. Go to File, Open Scene and select Weapon Start. You'll notice in this file it's our modeling template with a few additional layers. Select on Final Gun and take a look at the final gun that we'll be achieving through the next series of lessons. You'll notice I put a very simple texture map applied to it just to give it a little bit more definition. In addition, I've also created a color key. This basically breaks down the weapon into the various areas of interest that we'll focus on modeling. To get started, the first thing we'll do is switch to our Front View and opening up the Hypershade Map Window, we'll go to our default Lambert Shader, double click on it to open and go to the Transparency Slider and move it up approximately 60 percent. The reason we do this is so that any geometry we create within our modeling will show up transparent and allow us to see the template through it. As you can see through this cube, I can now see my template. Maya does allow us to do that using the X-Ray Tool. The problem is the X-Ray Tool also makes our template transparent. So for that reason I prefer not to use it. Once we create our basic cube, I'll mov it over to an appropriate position within the rifle. Next I'll zoom into the cube and by selecting the vertex, I'll go ahead and move my vertices accordingly to the various areas of the template. Now I'll select Face and by dragging over several of the faces and then deselecting unwanted faces, I'm able to actually select the side face without having to move to my 3D Perspective View. This is a little trick that allows me to stay within my front panel without consistently ping-ponging back and forth to Perspective to select the necessary faces. Now I'll choose my Extrude Face and move out to the first vertice within my template and now to scale this face uniformly from all sides, I'll simply select on one of the two cubes. This initiates the center cube, which I can now scale appropriately. I'll go ahead and press the G Key, which allows me to redo the last command and I can now move out once again to the next vertice line. Pressing G once again, moving out and so I'll continue to use the same method throughout the modeling of the weapon. At times it will be necessary to just move my face using one of the arrows. And there will be some parts of your model that you can not do all at the same time, such as this little viewport. I'll need to extrude this out later on once I begin splitting some of my edges. So for now I'll simply bypass it and I'll come back to that shape later on. I'll continue through the rest of the model, again roughing out the general shape and it's OK if some of my edges don't exactly line up. I can fix those later. You can also scale in just one direction if necessary. And at times I'll just use my vertices to move just one side properly. Once again, I'll drag over multiple faces, hold down Control and deselect my middle faces. Press my Extrude Face Tool once again and extrude outward. And so you can see I've roughly mapped out my weapon very quickly using the Box Modeling Technique. The final stage is to now switch to the Top-Down View. As you can see, the weapon is not exactly to the same shape. Sometimes I can just use the Scale Tool and that will actually help out tremendously. In this case, almost exactly. If I need to, however, I can just select over several areas of edges or vertices to fine tune the model. Because it's called Box Modeling Technique doesn't necessarily mean we need to use cubes. As you'll see in the next demonstration, I'm going to show you how we create an image-based model using the Create Polygon Tool and we will begin extruding the face in the same method but using an image-based model to start with.