To begin my Maya modelling practice, I wanted to pick a design that would be reasonably simple, but also featuring some geometry that would push me none the less, so I chose a treasure chest.This was after a few hours of working with Maya. This was my third try, as I used some questionable techniques that lead to some complex issues with the overall geometry and I didn’t like the overall look of how it was going. With the knowledge I had gained, I started again and stretched a cube out to a tall cuboid. I almost exclusively used edge loops to add more data points, more vertices, and then the scale tool to scale different groups of vertices, to slowly change the shape. I rounded the top of the chest along its depth and tapered the width slightly too. As I gathered confidence, I added more detail, indenting the centres of each panel. I extruded faces from edge loops on the sides to create a lock shape and handles. I used scaling to indent around the lip of the lid.Here I wanted to work on fixing some broken geometry that had come from adding vertical edge loops on the sides and then scaling down the width. This made the top of the sides of the lids come to a thin ledge instead of continuing the thick bevel. At the top a lot of vertices came together very close and in strange ways, which could have been avoided if I had planned the extrusions and scaling of different areas at the right times. To fix this top section, I have split the model in to, to help with having to do this process twice.Here you can see the strange thin ledge at the top of the side of the lid.Here is the start of my attempt to heal some of the strange polys, and now the top of the sides has more structure and better geometry to allow me to finish the bevel around this area.I had to remove all the faces in the area where the vertices were very close together. I used edge extrusions and vertices welding to move new faces over the delete spaces, and adjust the geometry to be more suitable for the model in that area.
