Modelling an alien

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Nine: The neck

For the neck we first Lathed a curve then set to work editing the CVs and Hulls until we were happy with the shape. Moving CVs beyond the positions of neighbouring Hulls creates the deep folds on surfaces with few spans.

A curve was drawn in a side view to be projected on the neck. To add more detail to the surface we decided to trim it, and for the trim to work the curve has to extend off the edges of the surface (or be a closed curve fully within the surface boundaries).

The neck was then split in two by duplicating the neck and trimming opposite sections. The front part was moved away and scaled so that a surface blend could be used between the two trimmed neck parts. We decided to make a few changes to the design at this point, but thankfully Maya's flexibility meant that the head could be reshaped very quickly.