Introducing Maya® 2011

Building a Decorative Box

In this thrilling exercise, you’ll build a decorative box, shown in Figure 6-141. This box will be a fairly simple model to make, but you’ll use it extensively in the following chapters about texture, light, and rendering.

Notice that the box has intricately carved grooves and surface features. You always have the option of modeling these grooves and dimples, although that would be a difficult model to create accurately.

Instead, you’ll build the box to fit the reference, as you did with the wagon, and then rely on accurately created texture maps in the next chapter to create the details on the surface of the box.

You’ll begin by creating the reference planes in the next section.

Figure 6-141: A photo of the decorative ...