Mastering Autodesk Maya 2013: Modeling I - Finishing the Helmet

Yesterday's To Do List

1. Add the detail on the side of the helmet.
2. The cylinder on next to the 'mic'.
3. Extend the rails down to the shield. 
4. The rest of the detail along the rails.
5. Create the 'hood' on the inside of the helmet.

Might as well go in order. 

1. Add the detail on the side of the helmet. 

First I tried to make a nurbs patch and shape it with the vertices, but it didn't look quite right, and it wouldn't really flow with the curve of the helmet like I needed. 

FAILURE

Then I tried;

Drawing the shape onto the helmet with the cv curve tool (set to 3 cubic). 

Trimming the curve, deleting the inner part.

Duplicating the trim curve.

Group the curves. (For some reason my trim curve was separated into three different parts.)

Move and scale the duplicated curve.

Freeform Filet across the trim curve.(ERROR apparently the freeform filet does not work on two curves that are not a part of  a surface. )

I lofted between the duplicated curve and the trim curve. 

I ran into a problem because for some reason when I created the CV curve it separated  it into three separate lines, which made it impossible to fillet across. I needed it to be separated into two sections. 

The reason it is separated into three separate sections is because it's running across the seam of the nurbs circle's helmet. Which would be okay if it wasn't for the fact that when I was forming the shape of the helmet I messed up the seam.

So now the nurbs surface is slightly pulling away at the seams. It's overlapping so when I'm looking at it in shaded mode it looks fine, but when trying to work with the surface/hulls it's messing up. I spent HOURS trying to fix this issue or find a way around it.


I ended up going on spring break and took a step away from maya at this point. It turned out to be a bad idea. I left at a point I was getting extremely frustrated with and it took me a while to jump back on the horse.

Well I'm back and I've gotten some work done.

I ended up just finding a way around my little problem at this point. I'm not sure how the problem occurred nor how to fix it. Once I've finished this project I'm probably going to go through it again to see if I end up with the same problem.

What I ended up doing to get past the issue was the following

• I drew the shape on the side where the seam wasn't getting in the way. [At this point I couldn't follow the exact steps the book seemed to have taken because my trim edge wasn't separated into two sections and I couldn't create a surface fillet]
• I used the trim tool with the settings set to keep and keep original. This allowed me to create a copy of the surface on the inside of the trim.
• I lofted between the trim edge and the new trim surface.
• I duplicated the trim surface and loft and moved them to the other side of the helmet. 

So now I finally have some of the detail on the side of the helmet.