Modelling an alien

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Four: Adding fillets to smooth the seams

To smooth over the seams and to make the different surfaces seem more like a single object, we'll use Maya's Surface Fillet tool. First you need to select a pair of surfaces between which you want to create the fillet. Surfaces must also intersect of the command will fail. Here's the first fillet (with the Secondary Radius set to a negative value so that the fillet appears on the outside of the head).

With Maya's construction History, all operations remain 'live' and affect subsequent operations you perform. The surface fillets, for example, will try to stay connected to each object, even if the object's shape changes. Here in the attribute editor you can see the Surface Fillet 'node' (rbsrf1) and its controls. These can also be changed at any time if necessary to change the fillet.

Here are the fillets applied to each object pair. Fillets can be problematic, especially when it comes to animation. It's always advisable to remove their History after you are happy with them. Animating any object with History is asking for trouble anyway.