DataLife Engine - Softnews Media Group

This is a tutorial set covering modeling and texturing of a pirate ship. We start with creating a project and setting up image planes before we start modeling. In this project we'll use mainly NURBS based geometry to model masts, ladders, wood panels, stairs, sails and railings which are then converted to polygons in the end to create additional detail in the model.
You will learn a lot about how to work with curves in Maya, using the EP curve tool to create numerous different curves which are used to build NURBS surfaces with lofting, beveling and revolving techniques. We'll rebuild, mirror and attach curves, as well as sculpt out shapes from primitives and work with CV's, hulls and isoparms.

For the polygon part you'll work with the split poly, sculpt geometry, cut faces, merge and extrude tools. There's a lot of similar geometry on the ship so this tutorial is quite repetitive at times and contains a lot of duplication and grouping of different polygon objects. You'll learn how to align and mold edges to get continuous wood panels running along the ship and how to cut out multiple holes for windows.

With our ship complete we move onto working in the UV Texture Editor to create complete automatic and planar UV maps and you'll learn how to effectively move overlapping UV's to obtain flat maps. We take these into Photoshop for texture painting of our ship where we create a stained surface with a weathered look. Once the color map is complete we make bump maps which lends the illusion of depth to the surface flaws of the color map and adds a more realistic look with cracks and scratches.