Mastering Autodesk Maya 2013: Modeling I - Image Plane & Modeling with NURBS

Modeling I 

Employing Image Planes

So, first things first in the modeling process, most of the time you're going to be modeling something based on concept art, or a real object, and if that's the case, it's always easier to model when you have something to trace! Usually you'll want at least a front and side view, if not also a top view.

In this chapter I will be modeling a Space Suit! It looks like it's going to be really fun to model, and I like the concept art, probably because it looks like there's a bad ass punk girl in the suit.

Here is the concept art they gave me.

I was also given a front view and side view, with less detail so that it's a little easier to model. The concept design is by Chris Sanchez, a Los Angeles based concept artist, illustrator, and storyboard artist. For more of Chris's work, visit www.chrissanchezart.com.

Side note: Because I posted his concept art and wanted to link to his site, I actually took a look at his site and apparently he has worked on a LOT of really well known stuff.  A Game of Thrones, and the Avengers. Just to name a couple. Very talented guy. Though I don't really care for his website. 

Employing Image Planes 

First I created a couple of Image Planes so that I could reference the art for my model. Until now I have been assigning hypershades of my image to a plane in the scene, which I can see the use for in certain scenarios, but I am definitely enjoying the Image Planes.

I had to set the front image to the 'Front View' image plane, and the side image to the 'Side View' image plane. I moved them around in the x and z axis' to space them away from the center.

Modeling NURBS Surfaces

I created a NURBS sphere, detached the surface along the middle, and then moved and scaled the CV's so that it would match up with the background image of the helmet.

So far, so good.

A loft creates a surface across two or more selected curves. So I selected the outer edge of the helmet and the shield and created a loft between them. I edited the loft to make it look a little more like the reference image and also did a few tweaks on the shield and the helmet.

In the next section I learned how to intersect surfaces. Basically it's like working with a Boolean, except instead of creating a difference in my first mesh it created a new curve.

In my last post I mentioned that NURBS surfaces must have four sides. Because of this, I was unable to create a Boolean, however in order to attain this effect I created the new curve on the surface and trimmed the surface. While I appear to have cut a hole in the mesh, in reality none of the parts of the surfaces were actually deleted. Rather, it made the parts invisible as if they had been deleted.

  

This next part actually took me a very long time, and I kept having to go back to previous saves and redoing work, which was my fault for not saving a slightly updated version after the first time I messed up, but still rather annoying.

I had to duplicate the trimmed surface, so the new circle that was cut into the helmet, and then scale it slightly larger and loft it in order to create a hard surface ring around the neck of the suit.

The neck part is still a little bit off on the sides, but for now I'm okay with that.