In this entertaining project for beginners in organic modeling we will create The Oliphant from The Lord of The Rings Movies. This tutorial uses a lot of NURBS based geometry so you will learn how to sculpt out a base elephant mesh using NURBS primitives and modeling techniques working with isoparms, CV's and hulls. The NURBS are then converted to polygons and to join different parts of the body together we use booleans operations and the split poly tool to add edge resolution around joint areas and get only quads in our model. We then move between sub d's and polygons to work on high resolution geometry when adding the organic detail that defines the final model.
The ears are sculpted out by extruding faces and working with curves we use animated sweeps to create nicely shaped elephant tusks. During this process you'll learn how animation tools can sometimes be used during the modeling process and how to work with curve tools to generate geometry on a model in an efficient way. A lot of time is spent on the detail modeling for the head to get the correct angry look that the original Oliphant has and sculpting out muscle definition on the body, and you'll learn how to create the features that defines a realistic organic model when you're working off real world references. When we have our complete polygon model we use the clean up command to fix normals on non-manifold geometry and get a clean mesh that is suitable for rigging.
From here we create the saddle and straps using more different NURBS techniques, during this process you'll learn how to use the EP curve tool, rebuild and loft with curves and surfaces before we add a three-point lighting system to create the final render of our Oliphant.
We then move on to laying out flat UV's for the Oliphant in Maya. Working in the UV texture editor you'll learn the techniques for creating UV sets, unwrapping UV's, and different tools like move and sew. The UV's for the different parts of the model are then aligned and combined to create a complete final UV map.
The UV map is exported to Photoshop for texture painting. During this section of the tutorial you'll learn how to create color, bump and specular maps for organic characters by using a number of different tools and working in layers. We make a color map for the elephant skin with a high level of variation and we also create a bump map to make our model more realistic and get the distinct skin folds and imperfections that elephant skin would have. Another thing you'll see is how to make gold paint and a satin material using many different brushes and painting techniques.
The textures are brought back into Maya and we add some basic lights and a specular map to control where on the Oliphant and saddle we want the specular highlights to appear.
