Making and animating a UFO

By creating my UFO I first started with a cylinder which I manipulated by  moving and changing the sizes of the vertexes and using the extrude tool. I added in loops to split the ship up so it could be changed shape further. 




It was then UV mapped using planar mapping, mapping out the top and the bottom of the UFO ready so it can be textured. I textured it in photoshop to make it look more like a UFO.





Specular Mapping is very handy as it allows us to texture certain parts of model, and make some parts more metallic looking than others. This is done by making a copy of my texture black and white. The lighter areas will be the more metallic areas and the darker areas will be more matt. Looking at my space ship model below it looks much more shiny and metallic now that I have specular mapped it.



Transfer maps are used to create texture within Maya, instead of having to export the model into sculpturis and then import it back into maya. This is done by firstly importing spheres and placing there were we want to create more of a 3D texture. Once that is done we add our selected ship into transfer map as the target mesh and select all the spheres as the source meshes. It is then baked onto my UFO model.  It gives certain parts of the UFO a more 3D effect.



Lastly we learnt how to animate the UFO. This was done by simple keyframes. I selected the first keyframe at the bottom of maya, and pressed 's'. This almost snapshots the first keyframe of the animation. I then selected the end keyframe, however I changed the ships rotation to 360 degrees and again pressed 's'. Then when I hit play the spaceship spins.



Exporting my model and files is very easy, I just select the archive scene in the file menu, which creates a zipped folder with my project and project information and textures.


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