In this video, we'll go through the process of setting up the image planes and putting in its first block to scale our whole model. [MUSIC] One of the things I have fortunately in this whole breakdown is, I have some dimensions that are going to be some rough dimensions for me to work with. And these right here 186 by 148 by 86, just happen to be in meters, in millimeters here. So if I create a cube, I know this whole thing is in centimeters, so instead of this 186, I can do 18.6 by 14.8 by 8.6 Which are going to be the general dimensions of my overall binoculars. Now z is going to be forward for me, I can see it down there and I want this to be laying down on the ground. So holding J and rotating along this axis, I can get a block in that's going to give me the rough dimensions of my binocular. So I'm going to call this sort of my reference cube, With my Outliner open to the side. If you don't have your Outliner open, we can just click on this little Outliner window, and it pops into the side. For this series, I'm using Maya LT2018 but my regular or older versions of Maya or even newer versions of Maya will just fine depending on when you're watching this. At the date of this video, this is the most recent and up do date version. So right here, these dimensions I have here, I'm not sure this could be the dimensions of the box. It could be the dimensions of the core part of the binoculars and not other areas. But I'm going to start modeling some stuff in and see what I can come up with. The next stage for me on this is picking an image plane that I can reference from. Now, I mentioned before that I have this really nice top down view image that's going to helps me model. So what I want to do, is pop into my orthographic view by heading space bar on my keyboard here. If this doesn't come up for you, you can always click this part over here which will give you the full orthographic layout and I'm looking for the top view. For now I'm going to move my reference board off to the other monitor just off to the side. And I'll probably be dragging you back and forth but for most part, I might have it over on this other monitor while I model a lot of this. So here under View, I can come down to Image Plane and Import Image. Locate your folder, I have lot of images in here and I don't really have the name. So I'm just going to scroll through until I find, this is the one I was looking, compared to some of the others, it's pretty large, I know this is the one I'm looking for. But if you want to be sure, you could always name this something like top view in your folder. Most of these images that I've gotten are gathered from a lot of different sources online, a lot of different resellers, camera companies, things like that. I chose this model in particular because I could find lots and lots of images on it. The overall searching process for images probably took me two hours or so to collect everything that I was looking at, but it's worth taking the time. Of course, I'll probably need more images as I go, but in this case, it's a good start for me. So here I have my rough shape of my binoculars and if I click this little x-ray vision here, And scale this up. Just selecting like in either object, actually it looks like their dimensions are pretty spot on, I just had it rotated the wrong way. So here I see my cube and here's the image reference. And I'm just going to scale it to generally fit. Now, I'm not doing this for engineering, I am not doing this for something that's going to become part of a production workflow, I would be doing that in a more formalized mulling program. Something that's more a CAD program, or Solid Works. In this case, it just needs to look good, so as long it generally conforms to the right size of everything, I should be okay. The last thing I'm going to do with this image references, is its sitting on my plane right here and you'll see if I have all my views up. If I move it to the left it right it goes out if I move it forward and back, we can see it move. But if I move it along this axis, nothing happens because these cameras are orthogonal, meaning that we don't see any movement sort of in this y-axis direction. So by moving this in the y-axis, I can move it away and get everything out of the way. I'm not accidentally selecting it, I'm not accidentally clicking on it but I'm still seeing it in my image. And if I really want to get things out of the way in the Show tab under my Perspective window, I can always turn off image planes just like that. Let's bring this back down and the last thing I want to do is take this image plane, over here in layers, I can find this under the channel box layer editor panel. I can create a new layer and assign selected object. It's the right most button here. This lets me create a new layer, which I'm going to rename to Ref, for my references. By clicking the R, this little empty window until it hits R, I now have this little reference can no longer be selected and I can make it visible and invisible any time I want. I'll like to use this layers for rigging and for reference layers. I don't like to use them for modeling because as I do Boolean operations, I separate, I combine things, this whole layer window can get really confused. For that kind of thing I really prefer to use the Outliner over here. So now I have a starting cube, I have a reference image in the background, and I have a whole series of image planes with lots of data to go off of. This is how I'm going to start my project, and well, it may not look like the fun and exciting part of modelling, this is really one of the most important steps to making sure your modelling process goes well. I often think about two, like if I'm really looking at something complicated, I'll sit down and maybe do a couple sketches, or drawing of something. If you are having trouble drawing something chances are you're going to have trouble modeling it too. So that's it for this part of the project, I just want you to get your references, set up some stuff, put some things together. In our next video, we'll do our initial block out. I'll serve a rough block out of the overall shape which will be the formation of our low high poly, and thus our texturing, and final asset. [MUSIC]
