How to make a weapon in Maya

A detailed guide on how to make a weapon in Maya.

1. Creating a save location.

To start creating your items and such, it would be a good idea if you created a save location where you can keep everything that belongs together. This way you can keep it all organised so that you know where everything is. Click on File in the main menu at the top, and then click on Project Window to bring up where you’ll be saving your object.

When the project window is shown, click on New to name a new project. Underneath this you will need to browse for an appropriate directory to save it in. I have created a folder under the name of Maya to save my objects in My Documents. It is an appropriate name as it’s easier to note what the objects have been made in.

2. Knowing your interface.

In the top left corner of the screen, there is a drop down list which is called a menu set. This menu controls what items will be present in the main menu bar. To create a weapon, you will need to select ‘Polygons’, as you’ll be using these. This changes all the editing menus to reflect the editing tools for polygons, which is what you are going to need to edit your object. The next screenshot shows you where the menu is.

To be able to make your object under the correct limitations and specifications, such as the amount on polygons you need to work under, you will need to turn on your heads up display which includes how many tris, faces, edges, vertices and UVs you’ll be working with. These are crucial for developing for a game, as your limit tells you what your game will be able to take in terms of a model. The following screenshot shows you how to get the heads up display on. You must click Display in the main menu, and tick the box for Poly Count in the next menu.

Doing this should bring your panel to look like this, with the text in the upper left corner;

The grey box open on the left is the Attribute Editor/Tool Settings/Channel Box. This screen area displays three components in a tabbed mode. The attribute editor lets you edit various properties of your object, just like how a property editor works. The tool settings helps you determine the behaviour of a tool and what it does. The channel box is where you can change the object’s co-ordinates, such as the position and rotation, as well as seeing its creation history.

Panels are an essential point in creating an object in Maya. A panel is nothing but a view into the scene from an angle you wish to use. There is a four panel view which gives you four different views from four different stand points. The four panel view looks like the below screenprint, and you can get to this view by selecting the four panel icon below the tool box on the left. The views in this option are top, perspective, front and side. To switch between views you need to click on the view you want and press space bar. This brings up only the view you want to use.

While in perspective view, you can change how you view the object by swapping your shelves to General. The camera icons that are displayed on the left of the shelf let you have the ability to change how you see your object. You have the option to Tumble, Track, Dolly and Zoom. The Tumble tool lets you rotate around the point of interest in the panel. The Track tool lets you track the camera and move where the object is in the panel. The Dolly tool moves the camera in and out. And finally, the Zoom tool lets you zoom in and out of the object.

3. Creating the general shape.

To build the general shape from a primitive shape, you can do this two ways. One way is to go to the main menu and select Create > Polygon Primitives > Cube, like shown in the first screenprint that follows. Or you can select the cube shape on the Polygon shelf, like in the second screenprint that follows. This is an easier and quicker way to get this done, but both ways have the same outcome.

After selecting the cube polygon tool, Maya will ask you to create the shape on the grid. It will tell you what to do, saying “Drag the base on the grid, then pull up for height.” Do exactly what it says, and we’ll worry about the correct measurements afterwards. You’ll end up with a shape looking something like this, maybe a little taller or wider, depending on how you’ve made it.

To change the measurements of the object to what you actually want it to be, you need to use the Attribute editor. Switch from the tab it has open now, pCubeShape1 to polyCube1 to bring up the cube’s history. This is where you will change the measurements of the width, height, and depth, and where you’ll add subdivisions a bit later on. I’m going to change my measurements from the width being 2.062, the height being 2.582 and the depth being 8.642 to a more rounded-up assumption of 2.000, 3.000 and 9.000.

4. Subdivisions.

To give the current rectangle a general outline of how you want it shaping, you need to add subdivisions. This will give separation between the blade and the handle, so you can easily work on each part without including the other. You can stay in the same pane in the attribute editor as you did for changing the sizes, as it is underneath there.

Currently, the shape has 1 subdivision for each face. For my weapon I’m going to add 2 for the width, and 3 for the height, so I can change the shape of the weapon easier. The weapon design I’m going off is a smooth curving dagger, shown to the right, and if you look where it curves, there are 3 points to it.

5. Edge loop tools.

I’m now going to split my shape into the blade and the handle, and to do this, and make the blade thinner, I need to add an edge loop, which adds another subdivision, but where you want it. To do this, you need to go to the top menu bar where it says Edit Mesh and choose Insert edge loop tool, then click anywhere on your object that you want to add it. If you click on the top or bottom line, then it’ll give you a vertical edge loop. If you click on the sides, it’ll give you a horizontal one, so you need to choose specifically where you want it to be. You can, of course, move it with the move tool if you need to. Inserting an edge loop tool is shown in the next few printscreens.

Here I’ve added the first edge loop tool, the line in pink, which will help to shape the blade properly where it attaches to the handle. Later on, I’ll add more when the shape’s coming together. Adding them all at once makes the object a lot messier, and if you get a shape coming together first then it’s not so bad, and you can easily add them and edit it to the finished shape.

After I inserted this, I changed the length of my shape, so that it was more accurate with my referenced idea. It is easy to avoid doing this, by getting your reference shape before you start to create your object. It is, however, easy to do though, by using going into Object Mode on your object, and going into the attribute editor again. To bring up the option to choose Object Mode, you must click right click on the object. This brings up a menu, as shown below. In this menu, you get the choice of Vertex, Edge, Object Mode, Vertex face, Face, UV and Multi, and the whole menu that shows up below.

6. Changing the shape.

To change the shape, you need to take into account the vertices and more subdivisions, as well as using the resizing and move tools. To start changing the shape, you’ll need to start using the vertices.

Two dimensional coordinates are made up of axis’s which include X and Y, which gives a point on the grid, also called a vertex. In the case that we’re using, there is another axis, Z, which makes it three dimensional. Where the points have values, determines the shape that they’re creating. When the two points join in a line, it’s called an edge, and when there are three or more of these edges connecting to form a closed shape, they become a face, or two polygons.

For this, right-click and hover over Vertex.

The previous screenshot shows me starting to change the shape. I have selected the three vertices on the end right, and have moved them slightly up and out, with the Move tool. You will find this tool in the tool

box on the left, along with other tools that will be above or below it, which feature Rotate and Scale. Now I need to start editing the rest of the vertices to give the general shape from the side. To make this easier, I will change my panel to the side view panel.

All that I’ve used to edit the shape is the move tool, which you can see is selected on the left toolbox. I’ve selected each vertex and moved them up and out, and now it looks a lot more similar to the general shape, without the bit at the bottom, and not smooth.

7. Changing the width.

I’m now changing the width of the whole object, which will make changing the blade’s width easier. You can change the panel to the top panel, but I’m using the perspective view as I find it easier. I’m going to be using the vertices again, and the scale tool.

My original width looks like the width above. It is too thick to be a blade and too thick to be the handle as well. It needs to be scaled down. I won’t be making the width too thin as I’ll need to make the blade thinner later on.

By using the yellow square, move it towards the middle of the grid, which makes the object thinner. The green square determines the height, the light blue square is the general size of the object and the dark blue square is the length of the object. I’ve already sorted out everything but the width. You can also use the attribute editor, like earlier, to change the size measurements.

8. Shaping the object to the reference.

As you can see in the screenprint above, I have changed the shape of my object to the shape that I would like it to be, similar to the reference that I used. I have inserted a few edge loops so that I can get the shape, although it’s not too smooth.

I have been working in wireframe up until now, where I will change to smooth shading. Wireframe advantages in 3D modelling are the flexibility to change angles and with quicker rendering, the ease of rendering with automatic calculation, and accurate photorealism, with less chance of human error when rendering.

I’ve now put my object into smooth shading. This, for me, makes it easier to see the shape of the object when it’s at this stage, and I can see the width of the blade easier, for when I want to change it, like in the

next printscreen. I will change it by grabbing the vertices that lay on only the blade, and use the Scale tool to make it thinner.

Now that I’ve got the depth of the blade fine enough, I need to edit where the handle meets the blade. I’m going to use the Extrude Tool to pull out the end of the handle so that it looks like there’s a separation, and so that it gives more shape. To extrude, I need to select the faces that I want to use and then click the Extrude icon on the polygon shelf. Remember, to get the faces selectable, you need to hold right-click the object, and hover over Faces.

I have added another loop tool in next to the extrusion, so I can scale this edge up more to blend in the extrusion rather than having an odd block at the end of the handle.

After this, to change the shape of the extrusion to a more ‘fancy’ shape, I used the move tool on some of the vertices that were on the extrusion. As the edges in my object weren’t even throughout my object, the extrusion came out in a different to shape to how I originally wanted it, but using the vertices that were in an odd position, I changed it to a better shape, which is shown in the next screenprint.

I’ve used the Zoom tool to look in closer at the extrusion I’ve done, and I’ve pulled the vertices on the right side of the object forward to make it look different and more fantasy-appropriate.

I was trying to add the bottom bit that you can see in the reference to my 3D model, but the extruding came out wrong, and I decided to use it instead with the inside of the handle. In the four-view panel below you can see where it went wrong. If you look at the top view, the extrusion comes out towards the right, inside of being straight down, which is not what I was originally aiming for, but I worked with it instead of erasing it.

9. Shading.

I’m now moving onto the shading aspect, as I’ve roundabout finished the modelling process of my object (later when the shading was finished I tweaked it). There are three main shading materials that are used in the process, which are Blinn, Lambert and Phong. They each derived from the shading method

of Henri Gouraud, which is a method used to produce continuous shading of surfaces represented by polygon meshes, which is what we're using when we turn Smooth Shading on. Flat shading is a less processed shading technique, and compared to Gouraud shading, looks terrible, as you can see on the previous page.

Phong shading improves from Gouraud’s shading, and gives a better approximation of the shading of a smooth surface. It includes the reflection on the material, which combines from ambient tones, diffusion of light, and specular highlights. Blinn was created after this, and is commonly referred to as Bliin-Phong Shading. It is used as the default shading model used in OpenGL and Direct3D’s fixed-function pipeline. Each vertex carries it through the pipeline and the values and interpolated by Gouraud by default rather than the more expensive Phong shading. Lambertian shading is an algorithm, which is often used as a model for light reflection.

I’ve started choosing faces at the bottom of the blade, to give it some more 3D. To bring up the editor for changing the materials, select the faces you want to change followed by holding right-click and choose Assign new material. This will bring up the box which you can see above, which contains materials to choose from. For my dagger, because it’s the same material throughout, I’ve chosen Blinn mostly, because it’s reflective, but have used Phong also for the darker bits.

The attribute editor will bring up the ability to change the colour to the specific colour of your weapon, the transparency, ambience, incandescence, diffusion, translucence (depth and focus), eccentricity, specular roll-off and colour, and the reflectivity.

I’ve edited the attributes, and as you can see the bottom faces of the blade are darker than the rest, which shows that it’s worked. In the angle that I have the panel viewing the object, you can’t see any reflectivity as the light is not reaching it, but in later screenshots you will be able to see the difference.

Here I have edited the rest of the blade, and you can see the difference between the two of the Blinn materials. The top of the blade is a lot lighter, and this gives the blade more depth to the shape. Because there is a darker shade to the blade in the reference image, I need to add this in with extra edges. For this I have added more edge loops, and have used the move tool to position some of the new vertices in better places so that it looks better. In the next screenprint you can see the shape of the shading addition done properly. The correct faces have been selected and I will edit the material for them.

Here you can see I have changed the colour to the deepest black and the very bottom of the colour scale. In the sample, you can see the reflection I have given is, using diffusion and the Cosine power. This determines how much of the object is going to be giving off the reflected light. The higher on the scale, the less area will be giving off the reflection.

And the shading progression follows;

This printscreen is with the addition of the darker shading.

I began to give the handle a two-toned finish to be more interesting and to have a slight similarity with the image reference.

In the next image it is showing me adding more edge looping to the end of the handle, as it was looking very bland and I thought it could do with something else. I put it into mesh view so it was easier to see what I was doing with the edges and vertices. I then gave it shading, which was lighter than the rest of the lighter areas (I forgot to change this), and then thought that it would look better if I scaled the area up to give the handle more depth. The process for this is shown in the next few printscreens that follow.

And this is my end result, in comparison with the reference for it. I did also keep within the limitation of using 1000 polys. In the end my dagger came to 772, which leaves just above 200 polys to play around with.