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Modeling Project - 2

Step - 2 Modeling NURBS Car Hood

This free video tutorial will explain how to model a NURBS Car Hood in Maya. After this tutorial you will be able to use CV curve tool and make a NURBS surface for car body parts freely.

Important: This lesson is the Part 2 of NURBS Car Modeling Project. 
If you haven’t done the part 1 yet. Just Go and do it for getting image reference set up. 
If you do not want to do that, then Download References Set Up file so that you can go 
ahead in this lesson.

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This is the second part of our NURBS Car Modeling Project. In this part you will make a hood object for mini cooper. We shall use CV curve tool for making 6 curves for our hood object. With CV curve tool we shall draw curves in 3d dimensional space and after that we’ll make them a surface with help of boundary tool of surface menu of Maya.

Let’s start the lesson,

Go to the create Menu and get CV Curve tool
Go to the front view of car image reference
Start creating CVs in on the front image reference of the car

modeling nurbs car hood

Hit enter when you have create enough CVs for your first curve

modeling nurbs car hood

Go to the Top view and move the curve towards the front

modeling nurbs car hood

Right click on the curve and get control vertex
Move the vertices according to the line of reference image in top view

modeling nurbs car hood

Place all vertices of the curve along the line of reference image
When done duplicate the curve and move it towards to front side of the hood front view of the image which is actually side view of Maya.

modeling nurbs car hood

Right click on the second curve and get control vertex
Move the vertices according the position of the reference image’s line

modeling nurbs car hood

Switch on snap to point option for creating third curve for the hood
Snap first vertex of third being created curve to the last vertex of the first curve
When you have snapped first point to the first curve’s point you switch of the snap to point option once.

modeling nurbs car hood

Draw a complete curve on the side of the hood and reach to the front curve of the hood.
Again switch on the snap to point option from status line and snap the last point to the curve to the last point of the second curve

modeling nurbs car hood

Go the side view, front view and top view again and again and try to adjust the positions of the CVs of the third curve according the lines of the reference image,

modeling nurbs car hood

Check and set positions of the CVs in all views
Set in Top View,

modeling nurbs car hood

Set in front view (which is side view of the Maya in this case)

modeling nurbs car hood

Check in perspective view after each change in CVs

modeling nurbs car hood
Note: when you have done 3 curves for hood, you need to duplicate and scale on minus each of the curves.

Select all curves one by one and press ctrl + D on keyboard
And change the value in scale Z of each curve to -1
Move all duplicated copies towards their proper place, see the image below,

modeling nurbs car hood
Note: this is the time to make first NURBS surface but first you need to attach half curves into one.

Select the back curves of the hood object one by one
Go to the Edit Curve Menu and choose Align Option box
Reset settings and check the box Attach

modeling nurbs car hood

Click Align
Repeat the same thing for front two curves

Note: When you have 4 curves instead of the 6 you can make a surface using boundary tool. But first you need to rebuild curves for very good results.

Select all 4 curves
Go to Edit Curve Menu and select Rebuild Curves option box
Change the number of spans to 6
Click Rebuild

modeling nurbs car hood
Note: Now you are ready to make the first NURBS surface

Select all 4 curves one by one
Go to the surfaces menu and select Boundary tool option box
Reset all settings and click Boundary

Thanks! you have created a hood object of mini cooper car. This lesson was the second part of our Mini Car Modeling Project. In next lesson you will model the next part of the car. Go ahead it’s too much easy and you can do all that within 2 days at least.

More Video in this project ..... !!!