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| Reference Image |
I hold my hands up - I screwed up. I lost my original attempt during directed study after reformatting my computer following failed windows updates (that was a fun day). Despite the soul crushing experience of loosing around an hour's worth of non-impressive work I managed to bite the bullet and just make it again, this time after having completed all of the directed study classes and another lecture on UV mapping. THIS time, it would be better. SCREW YOU WINDOWS UPDATES.
Additional Note: Around half way through this you will notice a lack of my fabulous screen shots. This is because I am a terrible person and don't save my work. My model became TOO awesome, and broke Maya. I lost a good hours worth again and this time I couldn't blame Microsoft so I rage quit. I came back to it in the morning making up lost progress but didn't continue capturing each step because I was in a bit of a bad mood.
Creating the base: I began by going to the top menu and clicked Create > Polygon Primitives > Cylinder (Options box). I checked the 'round cap' box and added some divisions to get a smooth top. In the orthographic side view I chopped off the rounded bottom so that I had a flat edge. I used the Mesh > Fill Hole button after selecting the bottom edges of my base.
Perfecting the base: I went to Create > Free Image Plane and in the attribute editor I clicked the file option to fill it with my reference image which I used to line up my base to achieve the best possible likeness using the transformation tools.
NOTE: At some point in my life, I accidentally deleted the attribute editor from the side panel. This ruined me for a good few hours because I didn't even know what it was called I just cried because I thought I ruined Maya and it didn't look like the Uni UI set up. Anyway the way to fix this is by pressing CTRL + A to make it rise once again from the dead. I learned this by READING THE MANUAL. ARE YOU READING THIS? I'LL HAVE AN EXTRA MARK FOR THAT ONE CHEERS.
Fiddling with the Fiddly bits: Selecting faces at the top of the cylinder I extruded circular selections to match them up to the image. I found that I had to extrude twice to get vertical edges rather than diagonal ones.
Making the grip handle thing: I went to Create > Polygon Primitives > Cylinder (Options) again to check off the round cap for it was not required for this piece and you just HAVE to remember to turn it off or you get confused and mope about for an hour before the ball drops. I reduced the divisions in the top (subdivisions caps) to 0 so it was a one click job selecting the top and bottom faces. I increased the Subdivisions axis to 18 (because it divided by 3 and you can see 3 divisions in the reference image) and left the Height at 1. I selected the top face and made it smaller whilst making the bottom larger to fit the reference image. To make the cap at the bottom I extruded the bottom face a few times, first outwards and then down. I selected 6 Faces on the height axis leaving 2 faces in between each and extruded them ever so slightly outwards along both x and y axis to create the indents in the grip handle. When I was happy with the shape I rotated the object according to the reference image. 
Making the tube: This is another example of using the EP curve tool. I made a circular face by creating a cylinder and deleted all faces other than the top in an orthographic side view. Using snap to grid I placed key points of how I imagined the Ariel view of the tube to look. I then edited the points using control vertex and edit points to match it up according to the reference image which was a bit of a pain but we got there.
What I then did was deleted the faces of the tube up to the point where the edge loop looked parallel to the top of my handle. I then added more loops using the edit mesh > insert edge loop and rotated them to get a smoother curve. I then selected the edges at the bottom and extruded them to create a straight bit of tube like the reference image right the way to the top of my handle.
Making Bolts: Well bolts are simply cylinders with only 6 divisions in the subdivisions axis in the attributes editor. I'm not sure if you can get octagonal bolts but if you can then just make the divisions 8 instead. I wanted hexagonal bolts though. I made this my hard copy of a bolt because I needed loads of them so I just duplicated them in OBJECT MODE by pressing CTRL + D. For precision I tried to avoid manually rotating anything using the transformation tools, I always used the attribute editor to input precise rotations for optimum precision. I did this by selecting the object and pressing the rotation tool to figure out which axis I needed to input my rotation data into.
Fiddling with less fiddly bits: To create most of the top bits I used basic primitives with some of my premade bolts, nothing special, just a little imagination and some lining up.
Making the actual handles: Mesh > Create Polygon Tool combined with snap to grid. I believe that I made the reference image lay flat for this and underneath the grid so that I could 'trace' it with the create polygon tool. I edited each vertex to line it up properly and added subdivisions using the interactive split tool to create the vertexes.
There comes a point in life where you take pleasure from making holes in polygons using Maya, its an extremely therapeutic process. Making a cylinder like always, making sure that I have 2 divisions in my 'subdivisions caps' which basically means that you get a circle within a circle on top of your cylinder. Delete sides to be left with 2D shape. Using snap to grid pull out the vertexes around the outer circle to create a square around a circle. It's easier to do this if you have vertexes in North, East, South and West points which basically you get if you have X amount of divisions in the subdivisions axis which can be divided by 4. Deleted faces in the center circle to be left with a hole in a square which we then weld into a hole cute into our polygon.
To make the hole in the polygon piece you must use the split polygon tool to divide the surface so that you have a face separate to delete. Align the square with a hole in the middle with the newly cut hole in the former polygon and merge using merge vertex AFTER combining them in Mesh > Combine whilst you're in object mode.
After the polygons are merged you can select the edges of the former hole and the edges of the circle hole to enlarge the hole if needed. After I've got the hole the correct size I then select all faces and extrude to get the shell of the handle. I delete the bottom faces as they are in the reference image.
At this point I stopped recording my progress with images. At this point I duplicated my handle, flipped it vertically and then reduced the size so it fit underneath the original handle. I now had a good model with a little tweaking of vertexes to match back up to the reference image after everything had been put together.
I now applied my understanding of UV mapping to the model. I originally had a custom image I made for the base fit nicely on my shape by deforming the UV vertexes to fit my image which looked like this.
Although I now know the proper way to do UV mapping I have to say it worked for the intended purpose although I won't be doing it again. I created the image by copying the reference into Photoshop and using the lasso tool cut out the logo and used posterize to reduce the colours and filled in any detail that was lost. I then added my own touches using irrelevant photoshop methods.
This is how the UV ended up looking after I did it properly by unwrapping and using planar projection by shift right clicking my objects in the UV editor. Then I shift right clicked to 'layout UVs' which put them in this fancy little order for me. I think that now I have played around a bit I could get all the object textures on one UV map with some time. For this purpose I decided to not worry too much about that and to just practice making UVs instead.
After I made my UVs and applied them using the Blin shader which was the shiniest, I made some lighting and rendered some nice images.
I went a bit further and followed a tutorial on how to make a turntable. It was successful however I don't know how to export it as a .mov so I will write a separate post about that later.
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