Its Alive!

I am not afraid to admit that a few years ago I was unfaithful. After using Maya since the dawn of the millennium I was tempted by a younger, slimmer, more focused modelling package.

This affair went on for many years. I would play with the other applications polygons and vertices while Maya wasn`t looking, only to go crawling back to utilise it’s texturing, rigging and rendering tools. The truth was, the joy of modelling in Maya had long since departed.

That was until the release of Maya 2015.

Finally Autodesk showed that they were committed to improving Maya`s aging modelling tools. Not just by bolting on existing plugins or shoehorning them into the already expansive menus, but by integrating them into the application itself.

The affair was over. All I had to worry about now was a boiled bunny turning up on my desktop.

So after returning fully to Maya and rediscovering its polygon toolset, in this tutorial for 3DWorld magazine I wanted to share with you my new workflow for character modeling through the creation of Igor. In doing so I hope to share with you some tools which are new, have been improved upon or even ones which have been around for a while but didn`t realise existed.

With that in mind this won`t be a typical modelling tutorial with step by step instructions on each body part. Instead think of it as an introduction to working in full screen, using the marking menus to help refine and accelerate your workflow.