Intro.
In this lesson,
symmetry.
Symmetry is the concept that something is made up of exactly the same parts facing each other on an axis. These can be distinguished by a line of symmetry, showing the axis that the parts of the object are facing each other on.
Here, you can see that the right side of the butterfly mirrors the left side. This is an example of symmetry.
Symmetry function in Maya.
to use the symmetry function in maya, i went to the modelling toolkit, found the symmetry function and chose the drop down arrow and selected object x. this would create my symmetry on the x axis.
here you can see a basic extrusion that i did to show the symmetry tool in action. in my own work, i might use symmetry to create objects and models that are mechanical and manufactured, such as mechs and robots, machinery and other objects that have been designed to be symmetrical.
Mirror function.
the purpose of the mirror tool is to create mirror versions of objects in order to save time when modelling something that’s mirrored. for example, you may need to model a robot’s arms to be symmetrical on each side of the robot’s body.
Mirror axis position: Object.
To demonstrate this type of mirroring, i deleted half of a sphere and made sure the other half was selected before going to mesh, and clicking on the tick box next to mirror. i made sure the axis was the same as the one i wanted the mirror to be on, selected Object from the mirror axis position drop down menu and applied the function. this gave me a whole sphere, as i had just mirrored one half. i can see how this would be used to mirror complex 3d models to save a lot of time and effort.
Mirror axis position: World.
Here, i did the exact same thing, but changed the mirror axis position to world. this effectively mirrored the co-ordinates of my half sphere, and so i now had another half sphere that was on the exact opposite side of the grid.
The Utah Teapot.
The utah teapot is a 3d model that was used for testing in the beginning of the development of 3d computer graphics and modelling. A teapot was chosen because a software engineer working at a university in utah needed a simple object to test his software on. It became very widely used in testing and so became an inside joke or reference between developers, and has been featured in the background of peices of media that have been seen all over the world. (toy story shown below, neither of those are my photos.)
Modelling my own utah teapot.
at the end of this lesson, i started to model a teapot of my own from a primitive cylinder, and using the extrude tool mostly.
Conclusion.