To start off Maya we were chucked in the deep end immediately, this was because then we could discover the interface ourselves, so we started off by making our players Spaceship. To begin the Spaceship we created a cube or a cuboid, this was our starting point for the body of the ship.
We then used the extrude tool and insert edge loop tool to adapt the basic shape further slowly turning it into a spaceship. It was definitely a time to mess around with the programme to see what kind of shapes we can make, and if we go wrong then its always easy to start again and create new shapes. After my fourth attempt at making a spaceship I managed to come up with this design, and the reason why it's in half is because I can then duplicate it on the other side to make it symmetrical.
We then were taught about UV mapping, this is where we change around the mapping to create a better base to add textures onto. If we just placed a texture onto the model then it would seem distorted in places, whereas once we've sorted out the mapping the texture should look good.
We played around with all the different mappings and for mine it was mainly Planar Mapping that I used because they are all flat faces, although I did need to click the little box next to Planar Mapping to get more options and change around the axis the mapping was coming from.
Also we used UV Texture Editor to separate the different sections of the model for mapping, this makes it easier to design texture onto the ship within Photoshop afterwards.
We then saved the UV texture edit as a targa and opened it in Photoshop, this allowed us to design our own texture for the spaceship. This also allowed us to play around a bit because we didn't know what would and wouldn't work with our spaceship. So it took many times of saving it and importing it onto a blinn attribute of the model to see what it would look like, also the outer lines of certain parts would be a bit off and you could see the lines so we had to learn to blur them together to make them disappear.
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