Asset Creation: Maya Scenography Modeling - Creating Games with Unity and Maya - page 21

Step 11: Here's where things might get a bit tricky. What we want to do is
make sure we have new locations to build outcroppings of the dock. Look
carefully at how extrusions are made to allow for future extrusions that
make the stepping out. Notice that this creates some pretty inefficient
topology (geometry where there needn't be), but we will clean that up in
a bit ( Figure 2.12 ).
Figure 2.12 Dock continuation.
Tips and Tricks
This part of the process is really about roughing out the shape. It
won't be perfect right away, so don't worry too much about being exact.
When creating this tutorial, I ended up with lots and lots of Undo's to get
back to a place that would allow me to more efficiently create the form.
3D creation is a process of stops and starts to be certain.
Step 12: Create a stepped section by deleting faces and filling them in
with the Append to Polygon tool. Select the faces on the far corner (as
shown in Figure 2.13 ) and delete them. This will leave a hole in the mesh
that needs to be filled. One way to fill this is the Append to Polygon tool.
To use this tool, be sure to be in Object Mode (right-click the object and
select Polygons>Edit Mesh>Append to Polygon Tool) and then click an
edge of the hole. Purple arrows will appear that show the path of the new
polygon that will be created. Click these arrows until the face is filled and
press Enter. Repeat for the other plane that needs to be filled.
Figure 2.13 Deleting polygons
and filling holes with the Append to
Polygon tool to create stepped forms.