Creating Primitives in Maya

Video Transcript

"Hey everybody! My name is Matt and I'm speaking to you on behalf of Expert Village. If you go up to create and then come down to polygon primitives, this is where you can create a lot of different types of basic shapes in Maya. I'm going to create a cube, so I click there. My cursor's going to change and what I can do is hold down on the left mouse button and drag out the base of my cube. If I do that again, hold down on the left mouse button and drag up, I can set the height of my cube. I'm going to go ahead and delete that and go back up to create. You can create a lot of different shapes and they all work pretty much the same just by clicking and dragging. What you can do is if you go back to your polygon primitive menu, come down, and uncheck interactive creation. What this is going to do is it's going to make it so you don't have to click and drag when you create a primitive. It's just going to create one for you with a scale of 1 all 3, x, y, and z axis. This is the way that I prefer to do it because you can always go in and change the scale and the vertexes, what you're going to be doing a lot of anyway. Plus, when you create shapes sometimes, they don't always appear where you think they might in a 3D environment. You always know where they're at. I'm going to suggest that you turn off interactive creation when you're creating primitives. "