Modelling an alien

One: Getting started

The first thing we did was to sketch the idea with good old paper and pen. This helps to get an idea of the form and sort out the design before building begins. There will be alterations along the way but making sketches first will reduce much of the guesswork.

It's often hard to know which part to start on, especially on our alien, which has a lot of interconnected parts. We decided on the band above the mouth, which is created from a simple extrusion along a curve, as seen here.

Next the lateral head profile curve is drawn using Maya's NURBS CV curve creation tool. Maya has two curve drawing tools, Control Point and Edit Point. The EP tool will come in handy later.

The curve is then Revolved (Lathed) 90� about the z axis to create the beginnings of the head surface. The Channel Box at the right of the screen can be used to edit the result of most operations. Here you can set the revolve angle and number of spans (sections) the surface has, as well as the Revolve axis and Degree of the surface.

Our alien has a fluted head which can be easily created by editing the Revolve's CVs (Control Vertices). The pink lines connecting the CVs are called Hulls. Clicking on a Hull selects the entire row or column of CVs it connects. This makes it easy to select the correct CVs and for us to move them in y to create the corrugated shape.

In case you haven't noticed already, we are only building half the head. The other side can be duplicated later. For now though, we continue to move CVs to shape the head. We can't really do much of this until more of the head is built, though.