And so the Mermaid Modelling Begins!

As soon as I was able to, I got my reference imagery into Maya and began the modelling process. I didn't use the coloured imagery because I didn't see much point so instead I just used the outlines as reference.

At the start I refereed back to the video guides and began in the same way as I did in those, which was by dropping in a cube and extruding it out from there.

The shape of my model was a lot smaller than the first character I had been learning how to model which was quite strange, but it was a good job I already had some of the skills under my belt.

I was very relieved that i had made the last minuet decision to simplify my design, because it would have been far too complex to model in the time available. I was pleasantly surprised at how quickly I managed to get the first half of the body modelled. Getting to this point was a matter of doing lots of extrusions of edges and a lot of playing around with the verts in order to give the tail the curvy shape I was wanting!

For the flipper which has replaced the hand, I decided it wasn't the best idea to have it completely pointy at the end so instead what I did was extrude it outwards and then add in some new faces to allow it to curve round.