Maya 3D - Creating the Spaceship

For the first session, I was required to create a 3D spaceship on Maya. This was a fairly simple process. The 'extrude' tool was essential in making this, as it allowed me to drag objects out of another.

The first step was to create a cube. I used the scale tool to expand it to the length that I was happy with. By selecting a face, I was able to use the extrude tool simultaneously with the scaling tool in order to drag out another object from the cube. This allowed me to create the wings of the spaceship. I was then able to drag the wing to the side in order to make it look more authentic. The front of the spaceship was extruded outwards and scaled down for it to have a slope.

The next step was to create the indents on the ship. This, again, used the extrude tool in order to scale down a face of an object and then dragged inwards, therefore creating a gap inside.

I made sure that the holes were on both the front and back of the ship (where the thrusters would go).

 Once completed, I had a solid look for the spaceship, which would be the base of the design. However, to make it look less clunky, I used the 'mesh' option by selecting the whole object and holding spacebar. This gave me the option to smooth the object once selecting form the mesh menu. I changed the division levels to 3 and applied it to the object, thus giving me a more curved and natural looking object.

I was happy with the overall look of the spaceship, therefore the next step was to create the texture. I used the Blinn material by highlighting the entire spaceship and changing its colour to Jet black. I then decided to colour in the holes where the spaceship's engines would be.

For this process, I selected the face option and used the paintbrush tool to select the inside of the hole. I then neatened the selection by using the shift key and single selecting areas which were unselected. Once i was happy with the selection, I changed the colour to a light blue, giving a futuristic/sci-fi look. I noticed that some of the blue had come through on the other side. To fix this I had to select the affected areas and re-colour them black. I repeated this process to each of the holes in order to get the final outcome. (pictures below).