10/15/2020: Today I got back into the tutorials and right at the end of the vidoe about the curve tool the instructor busts out that surfaces -> revolve lets you take a curve and spin it around an axis and produce either nurbs surfaces or polygons as output and that’s just awesome. Since Maya preserves construction history you can even manipulate the curve after executing the revolve command, basically like you were turning pottery on a wheel. So that’s pretty incredible already – I’d love to be able to do n-fold rotational symmetry but for now this will be extremely useful in creating any cylindrical object. The other topic I was able to cover today was using deformers. Since deformers can themselves be deformed the exercise was to take a very static fish, curve its back and twist its tail.
Inspired by that I went back to my Taiidani fighter model and in a few minutes, used the Lattice deformer to arch the back a bit more to get closer to the classic hull plan. No p3d at this time, just a screenshot for now:
The grid outline around the main body is the Lattice deformer, which lets you selectively deform the geometry within. Each of the vertices in that lattice can be moved to change the deformation. So here it was a pretty easy task to pitch the nose down slightly and bring the centerline up without messing around with soft select or moving any faces. Pretty neat stuff.