Protected: Your first room. Part 1: Setting up Maya

Introduction.
When I started getting into Level design some 10 years ago there was alot of ”Your first room”-type tutoials that went through the basics of how to make a very basic level in whatever 3D engine that specific tutorial focused on. This was a great help for me breaking into this field.
This set of tutorials are petty much that, but purly from an art perspective. More specifically these tutorials will help you make a simple room with a few props in it, set up basic lighting and then render it in a nice fashion. This is not game engine specific and I will not go over how to import assets into different 3D engines, insted I’ll teach you how to set up a nice render that goes over well in the portfolio.
Take note that this is not a GAME SPECIFIC tutorial but as I am primarly a game artist the methods I will use are the same I use when I build real time environments.

My goals with these tutoials are:
– Give aspireing environment artists a few pointers and tips how to get started
– Give other environment artists an insight in how I work

Setting up Maya.
First things first, you need to tune your tool. A poet does not write poems without sharpening his pen and a rock and roll star does not go on stage without doing a line of E. You neet to set stuff up before you get down.
I’ve been making environments for quite a while now with alot of different 3D packages, including Unreal engine 1, 2 and 3, Source engine. These tutorials focuses on Maya but over the years I’ve picked up a thing or to while working on different 3D packages and implemented them into my own pesonal little workflow. Before we get started let me point out that I don’t in any way claim that my way is the ”right” way as there is no ”right” way of doing anything. This text is simply one way of doing it so don’t be satesfied after having read it. Don’t sit back, grab a beer/coke and light up a cigarette and feel good about yourself. Keep looking for ways to improve your skills, workflow and technical expertise or you will never evolve and never get anywhere in your career.
– Projects.
The concept of projects in Maya is fairly selfexplanitory, but here’s a quick run down for you newbs: See ”Projects” as ”My Documents” in windows but specific for maya, and whereas My Documents simply save word and text documents ”Projects” comes with alot of sub directories for all the different type of files you’ll might end up using when wokingwith maya.  So in short: wtf is pojects? It’s a series of directories and subdirectories with the master directory having a special name of your chosing like ”Super 3D project.”

Use ”projects” when you’re making actual assets or something that you’ll be working on for a while. If you’re just opening Maya to fool around, learning new shit or alike there is no need to bother with setting up a project but it is a good thing for long term projects. When using projects it is very easy to keep track of your files and it also makes you feel kind of good. ”Yea, Now I’m working on this project….”
After a while you’ll also have quite a few projects under your belt and then it’s easier to keep track of with everything seperated between different projects.

So how do we do this? Go to File>Project>New In Maya and you’ll get a window looking something like this:
PICTURE

Choose a location for your project files to be saved. I recommend having a ”Projects” folder somewhere on a harddrive you don’t have Windows installed on and preferably a portable one. If windows crashes and you have to reinstall you won’t lose your files and additionally it makes carreying your stuff around between different computers easier – perfect for bringing files between work/school and home.
Name your project, then press ”use defaults” to have maya automaticly set up sub directories.
The important ones to note for now is the ”Scene” directory, where all your maya scene files will go (.ma or .mb) and textures, which we’ll use as our (you guessed it) texture files.

Set a unifom scale
There is alot of stuff to think about when you start working in larger projects, but alot of it is stuff you need to learn for yourself. I can imagine alot of you are giving your screen the finger but there are certain things you can only learn by experience. Sure, I can tell you this and that but if I don’t go much indepth of what I’m talking about, bringing up specific projects and problems, you wont get it.
I will however, share a few things that are quite basic and that I really recommend that you do.
First thing I advice you to do is set a uniform scale for your project. This is even more important if you’re working with a group of people.
This isn’t hard but is often overlooked if you’re new to the field and it results in people within a single project using different scales (measurements) and then rescaling everything to make it uniform, which often ends up with okay-but-not-optimal results. And in the end not having this set up from the get-got just adds extra hazzle in the end.
There might be quirls between artists if you use different scale systems within the team and you don’t need that drama. also I will hate you if you don’t do this and trust me, you don’t want that…

PIXEL DENSITY
Pixel density is another fancy term for ”How many pixels do we cram into this specific space?”.  We got this 1x1meter cube, do we make a 128×128 texture or does it get a 256×256?
Whatever you decide keep it universal for the entire project, meaning that if a 2×2 meter wall has a 256×256 texturemap then a 4×4 should have a 512×512 texturemap.
You should define this per project to get a final product that is of uniform quality and detail.

(unless they’re backdrop (lower resolution) or objects used in cinematic that are close to the camera (higher resolution)  but as this article focuses on the basics let’s just say that set a unifom scale that is kept all throughout the project.  Define it by something like ”128 pixels per meter” or so. (cut out?)))

Grid
As I am european I like to use the metric system in Maya: BLALBLA explain how
PICTURE OF THE OPTIONS METRIC/BLABLA

You define scale in Maya using a grid. I have my grid settings set up like this:
(Window>Grid then press the little icon on the right next to it to get into grid options)
PICTURE

Grid size: 1000 (this defines how lage the grid you see in the perspective viewpot is.)
BLABLA: 100 (this defines how large a single square is in in the grid by by calculating 1000/100 = 10 so you’ll get 10×10 squares in your grid that each is 100×100 cm)
BLABLA2: 1 ( this defines how many ”sub-squares” your 100×100 squares are split up into)

If you have set it up like I showed above it means that you now have a grid that is 1000×1000 maya units wide and as we set Maya to use the metric system before 1 maya unit is 1 cm. What this means is that we get a work area that is 1000×1000 centimeters (or 10×10 meters)

The BLABLA set to 100 means that you’ll split those 1000 cm with 100 to get a grid that is split up by meters.
Under BLABLA you have BLABLA2, which is the option you’ll poke around with the most. If you set this to 2 the 100×100 square bits will be split 2 times, giving you squares of 0.5×0.5 meters.
This is a really neat system to keep everything you build on the grid and trust me, you want to keep stuff on the grid.  Not only is it how all the cool kids are doing it but if you’re making assets to be used in game engines this is very important (and in that case, don’t forget that your scale and grid in maya needs to match up with the scale and grid-system used in the engine).
Heres a few usefull numbers in BLABLA2:

Set it to = for this result
1 = 1 Meter
2 =  0.5 Meters
4 = 0.25 Meters
10 = 0.1 Meters (1 Decimeter)

Scale and grid makes my life alot easier when working, and while I very much stress that it is important to keep stuff on the grid there are, of course, occasions when you just have to disable it and fly free.  However, try to always keep entire assets snapped to the grid as level designers will hate you if you don’t and I won’t like you that much either.

Using existing short cuts, setting up new ones and using shelves
Extrude/Extrude polygon
Cut polygon
Snap to point
Snap to grid

So now that you have Maya set up to my liking I hope you’ll find it comfortable to use as we dive right into it in the next tutorial…