Making a Space Ship in Maya

In order to consolidate the skills that I have learnt in Maya so far, I decided to model, texture and animate a spaceship. First, I started with a cuboid and added multiple edge loops on each face, allowing me to extrude specific parts of the faces. I spent about half an hour getting used to selecting and extruding polys and came up with the spaceship's shape. Next, I added cylinders as thrusters on the back and textured the ship using anisotropic material shaders.

After I had completed this I moved on to animating the ship. My idea was to have the ship perform a figure of eight. I grouped all of the meshes (the ship and the three thrusters) together so I could animate the whole spaceship together. First, I animated the ship slowly hovering up whilst the landing pads detract into the ship. Then I set key frames at key points in the figure of eight. Finally, I animated the ship pitching up as to slow its speed before landing.

On reflection, the design is simplistic - this is due to my lack of prociency with Maya. If I model another spaceship, I will make the body thinner and have wings extruding from the sides. Additionally, the animation was not very smooth showing that I need to learn how to use the animation tools properly. As a first attempt, I believe that I learnt by making mistakes. I know that if I model another spaceship it will be of much higher quality.