Now that you have a few basic skills under your belt, let’s use them to build a cartoon rocket ship. The easiest way to approach a project like this is to break it down into smaller pieces. For example, you can think of the rocket body as a stretched sphere… …the portholes and booster as different sized / oriented cylinders ……the tip as a cone… …and these fins as thin, molded cubes. So, I’ll start by creating a polygon sphere… …then scaling it up into a more rocket-y shape. Notice how I use the handle here to make sure it only scales up and down, otherwise known as the Y axis. Next I’ll make my booster, starting with a cylinder. Then use a combination of the Scale and Move Tools to get it into place. To help with exact positioning, I can turn the mesh wireframe on. Now, even though it's positioned correctly, it’s still not quite the right shape. The bottom of the booster should be wider than the top. That means I need to enter component mode to change its shape. Then I'll just drag-select these bottom vertices, and use the Scale Tool to evenly widen them away from each other. Don’t worry if yours looks a little taller or wider – it’s all part of the creative process. Now, this is just one piece of our booster – to make the rest of it, I’ll need to stack two more of these underneath. But rather than having to go through all those steps again, I can just switch back to Object mode via the right-click marking menu… …then Shift + move the booster with the Move Tool to clone it. And then I'll just do that one more time. And that's our completed booster! Well, almost. Notice that these are all still separate objects. To combine them, I’ll first make sure that I’m in Modeling mode… …then I’ll drag select everything... ...and go to Mesh > Booleans > Union. Now the entire rocket is green, signifying it's all one object! Next I'll work on my porthole, which starts with another scaled cylinder. ...except this time I'll need to rotate it sideways. Ideally I’d like to rotate it a perfect 90 degrees, which can be tricky when free rotating like this. which can be tricky when free rotating like this. So instead, I’m going to hold J on my keyboard while rotating, which snaps it in 15 degree intervals. Now it's much easier to get perfectly vertical. Now I need to add a rim and some curved glass by editing its components, but for that, I'll need more edge rings first. To add some, I’ll need to look at the cylinder’s attributes in the Attribute Editor. Specifically, I'll find them in the “polyCylinder” tab. In here, I’ll increase its cap divisions, which adds a bunch of rings around the cap. Now I actually have some components to play with. In this case, I’ll use Edge component mode to push and pull these rings. Notice how I can double-click a single edge in this mode to select its entire ring at once. Then I can scale them outward, just like the booster. Once I’m happy, I can Shift + move it to create a second porthole. Then scale it down... ...and rotate it to hug the body. There, I'm pretty happy with that, so now I'll just unionize them. Looking good so far, so on to the nose cone! This is a lot of the same process except using a cone as a base. However, it’s being somewhat obscured by my rocket, so let's switch to wireframe only mode to see through it. And then switch back. Then I'll just give it a bit of a scale. There. Now that it’s in position, I’d like to round it out. But like the porthole before, that means I'll need to add some more components, because there's not enough right now. because there's not enough right now. So once again, I’ll go to the polyCone tab in the Attribute Editor, and this time I’ll increase the number of Height subdivisions, which adds a bunch of edge loops up the height. To round it out, I’ll need to squish together these top rows, before gradually widening out at the bottom. So by now you already know how you could select vertices or edge loops and move them one at a time with the Move Tool. But you can also do this in one go using something called Soft Selection. Watch what happens if I press B while this vertex is selected. The colored region shows that, instead of targeting vertices one at a time, my selection now targets an area of effect. By holding the B key and dragging the left mouse button back and forth, I can also change the size of that area. Now watch what happens if I scale down. The vertices closer to the tip squish together, while those further away remain spaced out. This is not only handy for speeding things up, but also for getting nice smooth shapes. Which I'll show again using the Move Tool. The key when sizing my region is that I don't want to touch my base vertices, since I already lined them up how I want. Then I'll just move them down. And that's our nose cone! Again, don't worry too much if your model doesn't look exactly like this. Close is good enough. Now we’re finally onto the trickiest part – the fins. I say it's the trickiest because, unlike everything else on our rocket so far, they don't closely resemble any of the primitive shapes. In cases like this, I’ll need to start with the closest primitive, then mold its components into the shape I want. So I'll start with a cube this time. Again the rocket is hiding our cube inside, so I'll need to switch to Wireframe mode. This time using the hotkey 4. Now I can move it to the side... And press 5 to return to shaded mode. Then in the Attribute Editor, I’ll add a bunch more subdivisions along its width, before stretching it out. Now it’s time to mold. While I could shape these fins by pushing and pulling vertices around either with or without Soft Selection, I think it'd be a lot more fun to give you a taste of Maya's more powerful modeling tools. So let's try out a couple of "deformers." Deformers do exactly that: they deform geometry. In this case, we want to taper this long cube into something pointier, and then bend the result down. So with my fin selected, I'll go up to the Deform > Non-linear menu. And then apply a "Flare". This creates a handle in the viewport, along with a flare tab in my Attribute Editor with a whole bunch more controls. If I play with the controls – specifically Start Flare X and End Flare X – notice how it deforms the top and bottom of my cube. But that doesn’t really help… or does it? Because it’s not just the controls in the Attribute Editor that affect the shape. Watch what happens when I use the Rotate Tool to turn the handle. Pretty neat, huh? So that gives me my taper - now I just need a bend. So I'll select the fin again, and this time apply a Bend deformer. Again I get another handle and bend tab. And if I play with the Curvature, I get a whole new kind of deformation. Again though, this doesn’t seem all that useful until I start to rotate the handle. Then the cube begins to follow the curve so that it looks a little more like what we want But it's still not quite right. This is bent in the middle, whereas I want it bent from the side. So let's use the Move Tool to shift that handle over. Beautiful. See how doing that changed the reference point of the curve? And now I can keep tweaking both the bend and flare until it looks just the way I want. Awesome! Now the last thing I need to do is duplicate three more fins and rotate them around the rocket. However, rather than Shift + dragging them one at a time, I can go up here into the Edit > Duplicate Special > Option Box menu. Here, I can set the Number of copies to 3... And even rotate each one 90 degrees. Whoops, well that’s not right. As you can see, all my duplicates have huddled around my fin instead of my rocket. To understand why, let me just undo that with Ctrl + Z. Notice that when I select the Move Tool, the manipulator appears out here, right where those duplicates were huddling. This is known as my object’s “pivot” – basically, it’s center. But just like moving the center of the Bend deformer changed how it bent, so too can moving the center of this fin change how it duplicates. To change an object’s pivot, press D. This puts me in Pivot mode, which you can tell from the change in manipulator. In order to duplicate the fins around the rocket, I’ll need to place this pivot at its center, Which I can do by holding J again to snap-move it. Once that's done, I can press D again to exit pivot mode. Then I'll try duplicating again. This time, I'll also change the Geometry type to Instance – you'll see why in a second. And voila, the fins all rotate perfectly around the rocket. Now back to that whole Instance thing – the reason I did that is so I can go back to my Bend or Flare tabs and still play with the shape of the fins! If I had left the Geometry type on Copy, then only my original fin would’ve been affected by this. And finally, I’ll union all these pieces together. And here's our completed rocket. Of course, there’s plenty of places to go from here: you could add a torus brim between the cone and body, or little rivets along its edges. You could even edit the shapes you have now to get an even sleeker, more alien rocket. And that’s just modeling! Delve a little further and you can learn to animate the rocket taking off, add a smoke trail, and finally shade and light the scene to look its best! So get creative and have fun experimenting!
