NEXT-GEN Nescot week 4-5 - Off task experimentation

During my free time in between tasks, I have been experimenting with different tools and designs in order to help me understand the mechanics of Maya and to help me discover how to use different functions to improve my creations.

For example: Throughout my fourth and fifth weeks at Nescot I have been building a castle in Maya through experimenting with the extrude tool, rotate tool, helix polygon and smart copy/paste tool.

Shown in my created castle is a central building surrounded by walls with a small hole in one side, a portcullis (drawbridge seemingly held by helix-es) and a moat. The way I created the castle was by first creating an outer wall before then adding cylinders to the corners of each wall and then extruding them to have pointed tops, after this; I used the smart paste tool to copy and paste a line of squares (that were beveled on the inner side) around the edges to give a pointed effect to the walls.

In order to create the inner building I first made a cube and added cylinders to the corners of it before then using the extrude tool to make the tops of the cylinders pointed. Then using the before mentioned smart paste tool, I re-pasted the half beveled squares to make the cylinders around both the wall corners and the cube corners, to have a circular shape of cubes on top of each of the cylinders and a line of cubes on the edges of the inner cube.

Finally I created another smaller wall which I slanted to make a drawbridge and added helix-es to appear as if they are holding it up.

If I had spent more time on this project I would have added textures and possibly more detail, especially to the inner cube.

Update

I have improved this project by adding textures to the water, grass and castle, I believe this improves the project because it increases the detail of the model exponentially, and its overall appearance.