The "Make Live" button on Maya

Today Robin gave us a tool in Maya that he said will greatly help us. This was called the "Make Live" button. What this does is that it creates objects on other objects faces. This saves a lot of hassle because we don't have to move  the objects into the right position as they are already there.

The brilliant thing about this tool, is that in my level that I am designing, I require a lot of time placing things on top of each other and so forth, so just by simply clicking on two buttons, the item can appear on the wall, almost instantly.

How to select the "Make Live" button.

On the picture above, I have selected the "Make Live" button by clicking on the modify bar at the top of the screen and choosing "Make Live". Its really as simple as that. The only thing about it is that you have to make sure that you have selected an object to put stuff on top of, otherwise, it will be ineffective.

The object appears on top of the shape.

Once the button has been clicked, you are now able to put objects on top of others. This is very useful, saving a lot of time when it comes to Maya. The other thing to remember is that to move the original object around you have to make it "Not Live" by doing the same process.

I took this process into my Star Wars Death Star Turret that I had made earlier and this is what I got.

2 out of 4 sides.

This was an extremely easy process to go through in Maya, it only took me several seconds to learn, and in my opinion, its one of the most important things that I have learnt so far on this course. The pictures above and below just go to show how easy it is to use it.

To cover the turret it took me a maximum of ten minutes, I can safely say that it is fairly detailed. If I were to really go for it and spend a fair amount of time doing this, I can honestly believe that I could create some wonderful things in Maya. 

Another 2 out of 4 sides.

My Maya skills are really coming along for only being in the course for a couple of weeks. I'm actually having a lot of fun with it and see it more as world building game like Minecraft, than an actual program set for designing game details. I think by playing Video Games, its given me a creative mind and I have a basic concept from this as to what a game world should look and feel like.