Requirements
- Need to find a straightforward method of creating stairs in Maya to suit a Theater Lobby staircase.
- Need to find a way of creating stairs that doesn't involve creating them step by step (which is my initial thought on how to make them).
Research
- Upon my first search of 'how to build stairs in Maya', what I found was mostly videos, and the first webpage I fell across was a forum where a person was requesting advice on how to build stairs.
- Forum answers were exactly what I wanted to avoid - building the stairs one at a time and then duplicating the first step to make many steps. This wasn't what I was looking for, as I was sure there was a better way to create stairs as a single object from the beginning.
- I then turned to the videos that resulted from my search and decided to look into the first video, created by Digital Dreambox on YouTube.
- This video detailed the process of going from one plane to a full set of stairs by creating subdivisions, removing a diagonal section of these subdivisions and extruding the outer edge. This resulted in a set of box stairs.
- The video tutorial also included tips on how to create different styles of stairs, but since I was looking for steps on making some basic stairs, I had already found what I needed.
Research Sources:
twisteddragon33 (2004) Stairs, Simply Maya User Community RSS. SimplyMaya. Available at: https://simplymaya.com/forum/showthread.php?t=10921 (Accessed: January 6, 2023).
DigitalDreambox (2022) Model stairs in maya | straight stairs, YouTube. YouTube. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NokNFWgEdak&ab_channel=DigitalDreambox (Accessed: January 6, 2023).
Implementation
- Started out with an initial plane in Maya and added subdivisions to the plane.
- I then removed a diagonal section of these subdivisions to make an initial stair shape and extruded out the outer edge.
- This didn't look to be the kind of staircase found in old theater lobbies, so I decided to make this staircase even wider, added some more steps and added subdivisions across the width of the steps, so they could be bent.
- Also added a lip to each step and curved the entire staircase to get to the final result.
Analysis
- I think I ended up finding the most efficient method of creating an initial staircase.
- I think I did well in expanding upon this newfound knowledge to then create stairs that suited our game's setting and location much better.
- I successfully managed to avoid creating each step one by one and instead found an easy way to begin modeling the entire staircase.