Basics of Maya
Shotgun Shell
1. create > Polygon Primitives > Cylinder
To keep this simple:
subdivisions Axis 8
caps 0
rotate Z 90
Scale X and Z 0.36
Extruding Detail
(note: if you do not see Polygons and Edit Polygons in your top menu, press F3)
2. Right click on your model and a selection box will come up with options such as Edge, Vertex, Face, UV. Choose Face, and select one of the end faces of the cylinder.
3. Edit Polygons > Extrude Face
You can scale with this tool, but after clicking Extrude Face, I like to select my Scale tool and scale the extruded face out quickly and evenly
4. Extrude Face again, this time extruding the face out
5. Extrude Face, scaling the face in.
6. Extrude Face, scaling in and extruding in
7. Extrude Face, scaling in and extruding out
8. That gives us the basic end of the shell shape, but all of our edges are rendered wrong. Let's fix that.
Smoothing Groups
9. Edit Polygons > Normals > click the option box on the right side of the Soften/Harden tab. Select All Soft, and apply with your model selected. This will give the whole model the appearance of being round, but we don't want all of these edges to be soft.
10. Right click on your model > Edge > select all of the edges you want to be hard. Then, back in the Soften/Harden Edge Options box, click All Hard and Apply. This process is called Smoothing Groups.
Split Edge Detail
11. Now, let's try a different technique. Extruding works great for building your detail out, but what about if it's the middle of your model? This is where you have to learn to split your existing edges to get more details in closed sections of your model.
To start, Select all the edges along the center of your shotgun shell.
12. Edit Polygons > Subdivide, then right click on your model and go into Vertex mode. You should see a new row of vertex as pictured.
13. Go back into face mode, select the faces, and Polygons > Triangulate
14. Polygons > Quadrangulate (note: Quadrangulate does not often work exactly, you will often have to delete edges manually or use it on particular rows of faces. The whole purpose is to make your mesh as clean as possible.)
15. I adjusted the position of the new edge.
16. Repeat steps 11-15 in this section of the shell.
17. Scaled up the back end of the shell.
18. Now let's go to the front of the shell to use what we learned with extruding. I quickly extruded scaling in, then extruding my face in.
19. With another pass on smoothing groups, this is my final model.
Part 2: UV and Texturing
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