Thank you gents. it had a great time doing this. What's next? Exercises in lighting.

Very nice all around work Pixal!

holes in a curved surface
 

How can I get holes in curved surface in a way that keeps the surface smooth and has a hard edge at the hole.

Hi, PixalZA. Your work is so clean and beautiful. How did you do this? I'm new to subD and Maya modeling. Any tips you have would be greatly appreciated.

So far I'm having real trouble adding geometry in a way that doesn't distort the overall surface.
What tools and techniques do you use?

http://simplymaya.com/forum/attachme...1&d=1320606336

There are quite a few threads in this forum dealing with this. The one that immediately comes to mind is Jay's spitfire WIP. Around page 7 we kind of hijacked his WIP thread to discuss how to get holes in curved surfaces.
http://simplymaya.com/forum/showthre...t=36310&page=7

I'm not in the industry so I never went on any official training courses. Most of what I learned over the years is actually from this site. There are a good number of very good tutorials here. The instructors are good and do give a lot of tips and tricks on how to do things. I also found that having a look at other peoples' WIPs gives one lots of hints on how to do things. A person might have a problem with some topology and I've found that there are always people here to help out with advice.

So whenever you get stuck with something, post a note here and the guys and gals here will gladly help out.

Thanks for the link for that thread PixalZA, I've been searching through threads like crazy, but that one looks like it has some good info. I had some success yesterday with projecting a curve and using "split mesh with projected curve" and then rebuilding the area around the hole.

One trick I found for spliting faces is selecting two vertices and holding down shift + rmb to get a marking menu that has "connect components", rather than the interactive split tool. It's nice and quick and less finicky.