question about attaching objects
 

Hello, I'm horrible at explaining exactly what I mean, and it's not just with maya, it's with anything, pictures help a lot so I'm hoping this is helpful in you answering these questions for me, I will try and word my questions and good as I can.

I would like to know how some of you would go about doing this. I'm making a propeller on a ship that I started in the challenge form but was not able to work on for a couple of weeks. Now I was wondering is it necessary for me to connect the propellers to the object I have circled?
http://img54.imageshack.us/img54/926...icture1qa6.jpg
If I do should I combine or boolean? I tried both already and undid it because it came out a mess with 3 sided geometry. Is having a few 3 sided pieces of geometry going to effect it if it were to get animated? Will the animation need the propellers and the circled object combined to work properly?

How necessary is it to combine objects if they are going to be animated? If it's going to just remain a model is it necessary to combine objects?

RC, you do not have to combine and connect these objects if you do not wish too, the thing to do with them is group them and name the group as one object.
It is normal practice to combine and join geometry that is part of a single whole but if you have an object made of different parts i.e your propeller with it's blades and shaft then grouping is fine and you can simply locate the group pivot to allow the whole thing to rotate as it should if it needs to be animated.

thank you very much for your quick reply, I've been nervous thinking I was going to have to connect these parts if I were to animate (which I'm still not sure about). By next question, how do you group and name them? Because when I go to edit>group it only stays grouped until I unclick all the highlighted objects.

ok to group the objects select them all then hit ctrl + G to group them.You will have a new group most likely called group1 if it's your first,you can double click on it either in the channel box or the outliner and rename it to whatever you wish.
The pivot point for your new group will be at the origin (0,0,) so you can either center the pivot which I believe is located at modify/center pivot which will move it to the center of the group or if you want to animate it select the move tool then hit the insert key (ins located on the 0 of the right hand number pad) and then move the pivot to the center of the shaft on the propeller so it can rotate properly and then hit insert again to complete the pivot move.If you did not delete the history on the objects before you grouped them you might want to do that to clean up any unused transform nodes,but make sure your geometry is not smoothed before deleting history because you will not be able to get back to your lowest base mesh if you delete with a smooth it will become perminent.

just to add to jsprogg's helpful advice - a good way to select a group is to select one of the objects in the group and then hit the up arrow.

looks like a good model by the way (from what I can see of it) - make sure you keep us updated with a wip thread.
:beer: