In todays lesson we created a UFO in Maya. To begin this we created a cylinder by going Create > Polygon Primitive > Cylinder. I pulled the top of the ship upwards using the extrude tool and manipulated both the bottom and the top using the scale tool to make them go outwards and inwards respectively. This was the effect :

I ended up with some extra faces in the UFO which would make designing it later very awkward. To remove these I went inside the ship, selected the unwanted faces and clicked backspace to delete.

Extra unwanted faces in model

Final model

I then played around with UV mapping to make sure that the texture would not be stretched etc in any places.

In the UV Editor I re-arranged the different sections of the UFO so they were not on top of each other and easy to distinguish in order to know how to design each section in photoshop.

The final arrangement

At this point I also checked to see the figures of my UFO to make sure it wasn't an over complicated design that may crash Maya.

Next I created and saved a UV Snapshot, as done in previous lessons, to bring in to photoshop in order to design and paint the ship.

UV Snapshot

Here is the initial design in photoshop. I added an image of a black texture over the snapshot found from google. I then used the paint tool to draw extra features such as yellow lights around the sides and a blue shiny texture for the windows.

First design

First design on UFO

I then went back into photoshop for a second attempt to improve the first design. I added black rectangles to split the window into sections.

Splitting the window into sections (including snapshot image)

Splitting the window into sections (excluding snapshot image)

2nd texture on UFO

Going back into photoshop, I selected around an alien image and copied just the alien on to the window of the UFO.

Alien added in Photoshop

Alien in UFO Model

I finalised the design of the ship by adding a red ring at the bottom.

Texture in UV Texture Editor added

Final look at bottom

We were also taught how to do a specular map. This means that you can make parts of the texture shinier than others to get a more realistic approach. I used the rectangle tool in photoshop, to place white/ light rectangles over the areas I wanted the shiniest, grey/ medium rectangles over the less shiny areas and black/ darkest colours over the areas I wanted to be more matte. 

Specular map

As you can see the windows are a lot more shiny now and the black of the UFO a lot more matte. The red ring on the bottom of the ship was also made to be shinier, however not as shiny as the windows. 

UFO specular mapped

Next I duplicated the UFO to create a low poly model from a high poly model. 

I placed in the workspace a sphere, which I then cut in half creating a semi-sphere. This was done by going into face mode, selecting the lower half of the sphere and selecting backspace. The semi-sphere was then scaled down and placed on the bottom of the ship to add extra detail. I duplicated this sphere and added more to the UFO creating a ring on the bottom. 

I then placed the low poly model inside this high poly model with the added semi-spheres.

The detail was then baked on to the low poly model.

Lastly we were taught how to animate our model. We put in and out points on the timeline at the bottom of the screen in Maya and rotated the UFO in between. Then going to the graph editor I manoeuvred the line so that it was more straight, resulting in a more fluid and less abrupt rotation.

Final graph appearance