For the final lesson of Maya we created a UFO, plus we learnt how to animate it within Maya. To do this we started off with a cylinder, and used loads of tools that we had learnt so far to adapt the shape into a UFO. To begin with we used the extrude tool to lift up the top of the shape, and then using the resize tool we shrunk it to make a smaller circle on top. Then using both extrude and insert loop tool we further edited the shape until we got to the UFO shape we were happy with.



We then UV mapped the UFO so we can put a material on it later and it won't be stretched, by this point I'm actually quite happy with UV mapping and even managed to fill the majority of the UV Texture Editor which is a good thing to do. Although I was told afterwards that I could half or quarter my UFO and UV map it then but I was fine with doing the whole thing.


We then took this into Photoshop and created the material we wanted on the UFO, we also learnt how to use the Alpha channel and the RGB channels to our advantage to make the model shine or be see through. Also because we're all quite used to the process now we all started to challenge ourselves a bit and found this stage rather fun. Plus because we were told we were going to make it spin later on I made a design that would use that to an advantage.


Finally we learnt how to animate the UFO within Maya, using the timeline at the bottom of Maya we put in keyframes for the beginning and ending of the animation, then all we did was rotate the shape 360 degrees which made it spin. However the shape would gradually slow down towards the end so we had the change this within the Window - Animation Editors - Graph Editor. To do that we just made the line on the graph straighter so that it would continue at the same speed the entire spin.