Curved surface
 

I am designing a churchill tank so I thought I would draw my surface in freehand and export as an AI file I can loft between surfaces, but when I want to fill the gap in I am not sure how I go about doing so.

maybe we could see a pic so we know what gap ?

I managed to figure out what went wrong, I had to many points, but I am now wonderin if I am going about this the right way, I thought I should use Freehand to create the vbarious profiles for the tank but the more an dmore I get into it, I am thinking perhaps I should be using polys. Which would you go for?

my vote - polys. ;)

right then um ok pollys it is! :-s would you recomend making those images into a plane serface for me to work against? only not to sure how to go about that, I see they do it in alot of tutorials

couldn't hurt.

Cut them up in PS or whatever you use. Then open Maya. Choose the view you want the plane in and go View > Select Camera, then press Ctrl + A to open the attributes editor, scroll down to "Environments" and expand that tab. Click create image plane, then just choose your image.

I think that's right anway.

Also if it's slowing you down alot go back the the image plane attributes and change the display mode to RGB not RGBA as you don't need and alpha channel and change "all views" to "look through selected"

Many thanks guys :) I got them in and I shall start to somehow build this tank lol, how do I move the planes though?

Ra1der,

If you look in our free video section, we have a video on setting up image planes and reference. That should help you out in setting your images up. Here's a direct link:

Image Planes and Reference

Once you learn the basics of that. KB's refplanes script in our MEL section will speed things up for you as far as setting up the actual planes.

very good tutorial :) thanks for pointing it out to me!