This week Nick was teaching us how to model in Maya. This term we are modelling and animating an robotic arm. Today we began by modelling the fingers.
The basic mechanism for the joint was a polygon primitive cylinder and manipulated the subdivisions on the height and caps. We then added three polygon primitive cubes and scaled them to fit on the cylinder
We then added another cube and used edge loops and manipulated the vertices to create the distal part of the finger
We then duplicated that distal part and then used the mirror tool to merge the two together to create the middle and proximal part of the finger
We duplicated the joints and assembled the parts. The distal part and joint next to it were grouped together and the middle part and proximal joint were grouped. We arranged the groups so that group 1 was a child of group 2 and group 2 was a child of group 3. The pivot of the groups were moved to the mid point of each joint. When group 2 and group 1 were selected and then rotated, the finger then curled and moved like an actual finger!
From there it was a case of manipulating the vertices on the ends of each part of the finger so that they don’t intercept with each other.