Maya Beginner Tutorial Series 14/17: Custom Polygon Display Options for Environment Modeling

The following tutorial series is directly from Module 1 of 3 of "Maya Foundation: Home-Study Course" tutorial course.

I've released this entire Module 1 of 3 completely free. It is focused on teaching you how to get started learning Maya completely from scratch in 4 hours. Start with all videos in order within Maya Beginner Series here.

The full "Maya Foundation: Home Study Course" contains 3 Modules and 18+ hours of tutorials.

• Module 1 is focused on interface overview for game environment modeling.
• Module 2 is focused on environment modeling techniques (27 videos, 8+hrs).
• Module 3 is focused on UV mapping and UVing (21 videos, 5+hrs).

Custom Polygon Display will set visual preferences for how you want to view objects in Maya. Some of these options include backface culling, display normals, texture borders, open edge border and much more.

Many of these are very useful for environment modeling. Here are a few settings you need to know right now as you begin.

Video Tutorial

Accessing Custom Polygon Display

To enable settings for Custom Polygon Display go to Display > Polygons > Custom Polygon Display:

Custom Polygon Display window will open:

Most of the options inside Custom Polygon Display are also available under Display > Polygons drop down menu:

For quicker access to Custom Polygon Display settings, add it to your custom tool shelf:

Border Edges and Backface Culling

First two to enable are Highlight: Border Edges and Backface Culling: Keep Wire:

Highlight: Border Edges will display open borders on geometry. Open borders is where there is a hole in geometry such as when you delete a face:

Off:

On:

Backface Culling: Keep Wire will show the display of polygon faces that are not going to be rendered in-game. Backfaces on game assets are invisible:

As you can see above, Backface Culling will show you which faces will not render in-game.

Face Option

Face options contain helpful polygon display setting.

Center: displays a small square to indicate the center of a face:

Normals: displays face normals; the direction a face normal is pointing indicates visibility of that polygon in-game. Note the green line pointing out from the center of a polygon face. I also had to increase "Normals Size" value to 10:

Triangles: every game asset inside a game engine is made up of triangles. While you model objects in Maya, it is easier to work with quads (4-sided polygons) rather than triangles. But even though you are viewing everything as quads in Maya, it is still made up of triangles. You can enable to display triangles on your geometry with this option:

Non-planar faces: this highlights all non-planar faces to show which polygons are not flat; non-planar faces could cause visual glitches in your geometry.

Here is one non-planar face on the cube:. In side view, you can see that one of the vertices has been moved which is causing a non-planar face:

Apply/Apply and Close

Within Custom Polygon Display Options window will have three options - Apply, Apply and Close and Close. Although these may seem self-explanatory, to a beginner they may not make sense at first.

• Apply: will keep the Custom Polygon Display window open and will update the changes made; very helpful for making lots of changes to see what they do
• Apply and Close: will update the changes made and close Custom Polygon Display window
• Close: will close the window without any changes made

Reset Custom Polygon Display

To get back to default if you messed something up, in Custom Polygon Display: Edit > Reset Settings:

Next Tutorial in the Series

Maya Beginner Tutorial Series 15/17: Deleting Construction History

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