CH4 3d logo

After hours of painful maya deliberation and an underwhelming amount of support from the college i have managed to create a 3d version of the Ch4 logo in maya.

Exporting paths directly from illustrator proved to be a fruitless task - for future reference, exported paths from illustrator do so with their own special format that is not recognised across different platforms (including photoshop. You cannot export illustrator paths to photoshop!) You can however copy and paste paths into photoshop, where it will ask you if you want to paste as a pixel, path, smart object.

With this in mind, i opted to create the Ch4 logo directly in photoshop, snapping to guides for greater accuracy. It was at this point the problems begun because i couldn't get the logo to successfully import into Maya (using the File-Import command). I tried loads of different variables such as renaming the paths, exporting with the paths selected, exporting the paths without them being selected, exporting the paths and then opening them up in illustrator, then saving them so they appeared as a converted file - that didn't work, i tried creating a different path using one of the photoshop stock shapes (in this case a paw) and exported it as an illustrator path. That did work, so i tried to reapply this method to the Ch4 logo. That didn't work. After about 3 hours i managed to track down the ONLY guy in this building that seems to have an idea about Maya. When he exported the paths he changed the file extension manually to .AI.

Only then did it import successfully into Maya so now it was time to trawl the internet for information on how to extrude a flat plane along an ep curve.
This can be done by drawing an ep curve the length you wish to extrude it by. Select the shape you wish to extrude (in this case the ch4 logo, then select the curve and go to Surface - Extrude.

Now it's time to fill in the faces and to do this you must first convert the shape from nurbs to polygons. With the "surfaces" menu tab selected go to modify - Convert - nurbs to polygons, and click the options box (very important you do this rather than just pressing the button.) With the options dialogue open click on the quads and control point radio buttons and hit "Tesselate"

back to the polygons menu. Then go to select-select border edge tool, and then double click on edge of the extruded shape. With this selected go to Mesh-Fill Hole. Hey presto it was filled in.

Or was it??? On closer inspection i found that some of the holes had not filled in properly - they were adhering to an inner dimention of the block which is due to the extruded shape not being properly welded together. There is a "weld" tool in maya that will join the surfaces together. Couldn't find this tool so move on to plan B.

All in all this simple sequence of events took me around 3hrs to complete, which looking back is a laughable turn around time bearing in mind that if the help was available, I could have had the thing rattled off in about half an hour.