Use of booleans, sub divisions and the align tool

Today I worked on the Week 2 modelling basics. This included the use of booleans, sub divisions and the align tool and grouping.

Booleans

I found that the use of booleans could be incredibly useful for designing the rest of my Star Wars models however I did notice one issue. Depending on the shape used to cut through an object, it would potentially cause a drastic increase in the polycount of the scene. I found this to be a problem when using a sphere with the boolean interceptor on a cube.

Whilst the tool can be useful for creating shapes which would be hard to accomplish with other methods, I found a decent but not perfect workaround. If you are using a sphere, you can simply reduce its subdivisions amount before using it, as a way of reducing the polycount. The only issue here is that it could lower the detail of the object after it has been used.

Align Tool

I found the align tool to be extremely useful and anticipate it will greatly aid me later on when designing my other Star Wars ships. It was extremely helpful in my last practical lesson when trying a roof perfectly on top of my house as you can see in the screenshot below.

Alignment Task

Using the Align Objects Option window in Maya, I was able to stack four objects all directly on top of each other. I began by creating the four objects (cube, sphere, cylinder and cone) and then highlighting the objects and opening the align objects options window. I then ticked all the "Align in" boxes so that they would all be aligned in the X, Y and Z axis using align mode min.

Afterwards I un-ticked the X and Z axis and set the align mode to "stack" so that all the objects would stack along the Y axis. The results are shown below:

 

Merge Vertex Tool

A great tool I discovered on my own recently is the Merge Vertex Tool. Sometimes when using the edge loop tool and deleting edges created from the tool which I don't need, I can sometimes be left with other split edges around the object. To counter this issue, I found the merge vertex tool useful in being able to merge the edges back into 1 single edge like it previously was before the deletion of another edge.