Introduction

In this lesson the class followed along with the tutor’s demonstration and started creating a Mini Golf scene in Maya.

At first I started by creating platonic solid with 20 faces, known as an icosahedron.

Next, I went to the attribute editor and changed the subdivision mode from quadrangles to triangles. I changed the subdivisions to 6.

After that I selected all of the edges of the shape and clicked on the ‘set’ option in the ‘create’ menu.

In object mode, I went to the ‘mesh’ menu and chose to smooth out the mesh with the ‘smooth’ option.

Doing that left me with this result:

In the outliner, I selected the set members by right clicking on the set and pressing the delete key. This gave me a golf ball that was covered in hexagonal faces.

I selected all the faces and chose the extrude option. In the extrude menu, I changed the offset (hexagon size) to 0.02 and used the scale function (R key) to push the hexagons inwards

This gave me a finished golf ball with hexagonal dents in it.

Conclusion

Before this lesson, I hadn’t used the offset function that much when extruding in Maya but now I make use of it quite a lot. It’s useful for creating repeated patterns of faces and extruding more complex objects. I used it to create a window frame: