Summary

In this chapter, you've expanded and honed your modeling skills for complex and organic shapes. Some of the areas you've explored include the following:

• Subdivision Surfaces A special form of modeling in Maya that's rooted in basic polygon editing techniques and is particularly well suited to smooth organic shapes.

• Smooth Proxy A fast and useful alternative to Subdivision Surfaces that uses polygons.

• Merge vertices and split polygons Standard techniques for reducing or increasing the control complexity in an area.

• Partial and full creases Subdivision Surfaces allow creasing selected edges so that the model can have sharper points.

• Attaching, combining, and merging Groups of polygons can be attached to form one object, and the vertices in those groups of polygons remain the same unless you merge them.

• Cutting a hole to fit an arbitrary new attachment You learned to create a custom-shaped opening in a closed surface for attaching a new object.

This chapter covered one approach to modeling a human head. However, this approach can be applied to practically any object that you can take two relatively orthographic photographs of or objects that you can draw or collect from other sources. As you use these tools more and become familiar with the way good surfaces should flow, modeling complex objects will be quicker and easier for you.