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Basic Modeling
The Bowl
First, let's make sure that interactive creation is turned off. From the menu at the top, go to Create → Polygon Primitives. Click the Interactive Creation entry on the menu to uncheck the box (if it is not already unchecked somehow). Now go ahead and create a cylinder: Create → Polygon Primitives → Cylinder.
Before we go any further. Let's get in the good habit of naming our objects. If you go open your outliner under Window->Outliner, you will see pCylinder1. If you double click the text pCylinder1, you can rename it. Let's name it bowl.
Now change the cylinder options under INPUTS in the Channel Box. To show the channel box, click the right most button in the upper right corner of the window.
Under where it says "INPUTS", there should be some text that says "polyCylinder1". Clicking on that will reveal a few different properties like "Radius" and "Height" with different values that you can change. Go ahead and change "Subdivisions Axis" to 10, and change "Subdivisions Caps" to 0. Your cylinder should change to look like the one below.
Switch to Face Mode by moving the mouse cursor over the cylinder , and holding down the right mouse button . When the menu pops up, drag the mouse cursor over 'Face' and release the right mouse button.
Now that you are in face mode, you can select (left-click) and delete the caps by pressing Backspace on the keyboard.
Use the right-click menu and select 'Object'. This goes back out into object mode. Select the cylinder (should highlight green). Switch to the move tool by clicking on the button on the left side of the screen or hitting "w" on the keyboard and move the cylinder up a bit on the y-axis (drag the upward arrow). Then, switch to the scale tool (second button below move, or "r" on the keyboard) and drag the z-axis arrow a little bit to stretch it lengthwise, like in the picture below.
Use the right-click menu again to go into 'Edge' mode. Use the move tool and the scale tool on the vertical edges towards the back of the bowl so the bowl is slightly flatter and wider in back.
While still in Edge mode, we can double-click on one of the bottom horizontal edges to select the whole ring. We want to extrude the bottom ring downwards to make the bowl deeper:
Go to Edit Mesh → Extrude and make sure that the box at the top of the menu titled "Keep Faces Together" is checked. Unfortunately maya defaults to extruding all edges (or faces) individually which is not what we want.
This will give you a weird manipulator. This manipulator doesn't always behave in an intuitive way so many people switch immediately to another tool (in this case, use the move tool *w*). Then move the automatically selected edges down.
Always make sure to move whatever you are extruding; if you extrude edges or faces, and you do not move them, they will remain in the same place as the original edges or faces, so you will only see one set of polygons where there are two. If you extrude and forget that you have done so, it can cause problems later on, and sometimes it's a little tricky to fix, so be careful!
The best way to check if you have already extruded a piece of geometry is to select the relevant faces or edges, and use the move tool to shift them aside temporarily in order to "peek" behind them. If you move a face/edge and there's an identical one right where the one you moved was, you already extruded that region. The best solution is usually to press undo, but that only really works if you extruded recently. Otherwise, you'll have to go through the model and delete the extra faces yourself -- if this happens to you during the lab, be sure to ask a facilitator for help!
Go into vertex-mode and tweak the bottom points to get a more rectangular base that many toilets tend to have.
In edge mode, do the double-click-select-edge-ring thing again, extrude the bottom edge down, and then tweak the verts on that ring.
Next we want to give it some bowl shape. This means we must add another edge-loop in the middle of the tapering portion. So with our mesh in edge mode, go to Edit Mesh → Insert Edge Loop Tool
Pick one of the vertical edges on the bowl and left mouse drag. When you let go, the loop should get added. Since that loop is already selected, you can just scale those edges out to get a more bowl-ish shape.
Then we'll want to add another loop to be the bottom of the bowl (where the bowl meets the rectangular part of the toilet). Adjust the new loop to be more-or-less flat with the base.
As the last touch on refining the shape of the toilet, go into Face mode and grab the bottom portion and pull it back a bit.
At the top now, let's give the lip some thickness. Select the lip and extrude, switch to scale tool and scale in. Then extrude again, switch to move tool, and move down.
So far, we've had a very sharp/polygonized, cg-looking toilet. Usually they are smooth. Maya has a smooth-preview feature that will show you a catmull-clark subdivided version of the mesh. This means it'll be much smoother. Hit *3 to switch into smooth-preview mode. Hit *2 to switch into smooth-preview with non-smooth cage. Hit *1* to switch back out of smooth-preview.
You'll notice that our smooth-preview removes some of the desired sharper corners. The technique to fixing this involves inserting edge loops close to where you want sharp edges. Whenever two loops are close together, they make a sharper corner. Let's add edge loops to sharpen corners near the top of the bowl, near the top inside the bowl, and near the bottom of the bowl. This should give us a fairly smooth bowl with sharper corners when smoothed.
Now we are going to add the rear portion of the toilet. This requires extruding faces, rather than edges as we did before. Go to Edit Mesh -> Extrude, and once again make sure that Keep Faces Together is checked.
Okay, now select and extrude the faces on the back part of the toilet back further.
Flatten out the back using the scale tool to scale down along z (a nifty trick for flattening things). Hold down j before scaling and it will help flatten the surface quickly.
Extrude back once more and then tweak the shape to be however you want the back of your toilet to look.
The Tank
Our next step is to make the tank on the back. We'll start with a cube: Create another cube and put it into position. Then in the channel box again under polyCube#, change the subdivisions all to 3. This gives us enough subdivisions to have sharper corners (if we smooth now, it will be too round).
Now tweak the shape of the tank. Remember, putting edge loops close together will create a sharper corner on the smoothed mesh.
The tank needs a lid. So, instead of creating a new cube and trying to get it to look like the current tank shape, we can just duplicate the top face of the tank.
Select only the top face of tank and go to Edit Mesh → Duplicate Face. The new object is now highlighted in green. Like Extrude, Duplicate Face uses a weird manipulator, so switch to the Move tool again and left click on the new object to select it. Move it up a bit, then switch back into Face mode and scale it to make it sit nicely on top of the original tank.
Select those faces and extrude the faces downwards to make the tank's lid shape.
To make it fit over the tank, scale the lid up a little. Also, sharpen the top and bottom of the lid a little by adding some more loops.
Seat and Lid
Onto the toilet seat and lid! We'll use the same duplicate faces trick to duplicate the top faces of the bowl's shape. Once those faces are seperated, we can then duplicate the new object by going into object mode, then going up to Edit --> Duplicate or simply by hitting Cmd-D. Go ahead and name the lower object seat and the top object lid on the outliner.
To finish up the seat, scale the inner loop more inwards and then extrude the whole shape downwards. Add a loop near the bottom for a sharper edge. Then Add some loops on the top and move them up to get a rounder shaped top (more comfy for your butt). Then tweak to your liking (maybe scale it up so it slightly overhangs the bowl or something).
Now, select the lid (unhide it if its hidden) and enter edge mode. Then select the inner edge-loop and shrink it inward a bit. A toilet lid usually doesn't have a big hole in the middle, so we need to fill that hole. Fill the hole by selecting one of those inner edges and going to Mesh → Fill Hole
Your lid object should now look something like this:
You'll notice that it has filled the hole with a 10-sided face. Usually we avoid faces with this many sides because smoothing a face like this behaves unpredictably. So, let's turn that face into 4 quads.(Quads meaning quadrilaterals.) We'll use the Interactive Split tool for this Edit Mesh → Interactive Split Tool:
This tool is a little weird; here's how it works: First, left click on a vertex to start a new edge, then mouse over to the opposing vertex and left click again. You can then right-click to complete that edge. You can then left click on the next vertex, and do the same thing. Once you have create 3 new edges, hit enter on your keyboard to complete the action and exit the tool.
Do the same things we did to make the seat and tweak it until it looks right.
Now we have a very basic toilet-looking object (without a flusher or hinges or bowl internals or a base). It is still in separate pieces. Once you are done and plan on using the toilet as an asset (no pun intended), it is recommended to combine them into one mesh or to group all the pieces. You can combine mesh pieces by selecting them and going to Mesh → Combine. You can group the pieces by selecting them and going to Edit → Group.
Extra for Experts
Now you have a grey model. It is bland and boring and needs a spice of color. Here is a quick tutorial for coloring your models.
Select your completed toilet. Hold right click and select Assign New Material.
A window listing different materials should pop up. As you can see from this list, there are many different materials that can be assigned to your objects. We will go over two basic ones for now Lambert and Phong. More details will be provided in the Shading lab.
Lambert
The lambert material type is used to simulate flat, dull materials like plastic or clay.
Phong
The phong material type is used to simulate any sort of glossy surface because it is "shiny." Examples are metallic objects, or shinier plastics.
Now that you know a little about lamberts and phongs. In the Assign New Material window click on either lambert or phong. The Attribute Editor should then appear. It is good practice to name your shaders and that can be done in the attribute editor.
To change the color of this shader, click on Color in the Attribute Editor. A color palette will appear, from there select the color that you want.
Your toilet should now be in color! The toilet below is assigned to a red lambert.
If you chose lambert and decided phong would be a better shader for your toilet or vice versa, you can change the material type by clicking Type in the Attribute Editor. A drop down list should appear.
And if you chose to color your toilet red instead of blue, we forgive you. Remember you can change the color by selecting Color in the Attribute Editor.
The toilet is now assigned to a blue phong material. Much better!
Go ahead and have fun putting color into your world!