DataLife Engine - Softnews Media Group

In this fun project we will create the second world war Spitfire plane. This is a tutorial set covering both the modeling and texturing process of our model.
During the modeling tutorial we'll use all Maya's different geometry types so you'll get a good idea of how to work with NURBS, polygons and subdivisions. We start by setting up image planes for the Spitfire and move on to working with NURBS primitives to get the main shape of the aeroplane body, nose, tail and wings which are then converted to polygons and merged together with the booleans union tool. We align the edges nicely by snapping vertices to allow for a smooth shape with good edge flow which can be converted to subdivisions to sculpt out detail on the cockpit and wings. By extruding and inserting edges with the split poly tool we create clean defined edges on the model and follow along with the references on our image planes to get a realistic real world shape for our model.

Once we have good geometry for the whole aeroplane body and cockpit we create the propeller, engines, wing panels and wheels for landing and take off using the existing lines in our geometry and booleans difference to get additional parts to fit nicely on the main model so the wheels can get folded in once the plane is animated. We extrude and scale edges to get a good flow in the panel lines along the wings and clean up geometry to keep a clean mesh without n-gons.

With our final model complete, we start with the UV layout and work in the UV Texture Editor with some different tools for UV mapping. The UV map is exported to Photoshop where we texture paint a camouflage color map to get the right Spitfire look and work with ellipse and line tools. We also add a bump map to elevate certain areas on the wing and tail and bring out as much detail as possible in our model. The last thing we do in this tutorial is to create a spec map to get control of where and how the specular highlights will occur in our final renders.