Mastering Autodesk Maya 2013: Modeling I - Modeling NURBS Surfaces

Okay, so I come home from work today, ready to get in some time in Maya. I open my saved scene from last night, and lookie what I found!

A tear.

Lucky me.

After a bit of research, I ended up lofting the two isoparms and attaching the loft to the main mesh. It seems to have worked but I can still kind of tell that there  is a seam.

I don't understand why it happened in the first place. Silly NURBS.

Apparently this section doesn't actually take me through a tutorial on how to model this character completely. I was given separate files that already have some parts of the suit. I'm going to do my best to make these parts on my own.

The next part I'm going to make is one of the lamps on top of the helmet. The only thing that I wasn't given step by step instructions for  was how to do the lens and the casing. The book took me through how to attach the lens to the case as well as how to make the latches around the headlight.

Making the lens and casing was relatively easy, and the rest of the headlight was mainly lofts, freeform fillets, and duplicating isoparms.

Looking good. At this point I had to save and run out of the house, hoping that I wouldn't end up with any more splits in my mesh. Luckily everything was alright when I got home.

I went in and moved the hulls and vertices around so that the brackets had more shape and the helmet was not longer reminiscent of Mickey Mouse.

Creating Rail Surfaces

In the next section I learned how to create a rail surface. As the name implies the surface that you are creating basically 'rides the rails' of two other curves that have been made. I created a CV curve, duplicated it, rotated it, and then created a BV curve in the middle to connect the two curves. The BV curve is the surface, and the two CV curves are what it will ride along. It was with this method that I created the two outter 'rails' on the top of the helmet.

After creating one rail I duplicated it and then created a loft between the two rails and created the three bumps on the top of the helmet. 

It's looking pretty good if I do say so myself. 

I really do need to work on speed eventually, but since I'm still learning I'll cut myself a break for now. I'm hoping to have this project finished within the next five days. I feel like it should be enough time granted no outside factors come into play.