kind of feel stupid
 

I'm extremely new to Maya. I have an old copy of Maya 6 that I got off my dads friend. I've purchased one of the books and I am still working my way through it.

My problem is this. I have a cylinder that I want the faces extruded, like a cog. The book teached how to extrude the faces but It won't work properly for what i'm trying to do. Can anyone help me please?

I know how you feel. Seeing as how my job uses Max, when I get home to play with maya for stuff, I feel idiotic.

I don't really have an answer but I will tell you this. Watch a tutorial. I never was able to read a book and then do it in the program.. no idea why.

I find that watching tutorials and then mimicking what they do, teaches me better, almost as if Im standing over their shoulder then doing it for myself.

Anyway, dont feel stupid. It happens to all of us. Even the ones that have jobs in 3D.

D3D

Everything's Hard, untill you know how...
 

Without a pic, can't be sure of your predicament Codar,

have you gone to Polygons->ToolOptions, and checked that Keep Faces Together is turned off?

As long as they're turned off, each of the faces has a gap between them - or what would be the 'valley' part of the gear; the low-spot between each tooth, as it were.

So, turn the option off, create a poly cylinder, scale it's 'height', so the gear's not too thick. Then just select all the faces around the edge, do a poly extrusion, pull them out with the blue handle, then scale with the red and/or green scale boxes to get the look you want.

If I recall, there's a tute around somewhere called "How to model a gear and render it with mental ray" or something like that. It's aimed at those that are new and learning - it's bound to describe it better than I have here.

Simon.