Deformed spider-like thing
 

just a quick note. i'm still transitioning into maya. i'm actually an art institute student majoring in interactive media and took up 3d modeling and 3d animation as a sort of 'minor' to help in my production of some 3d/flash/web hybrid projects and i just got hooked to the whole modeling thing. my modeling class used 3d studio max which is what i'm accustomed to and i'm glad that maya isn't all too different from 3d studio max.

i also made the mistake of using surfaces to build the main body of this thing. i wish i would've used polygons. reason being is because i just figured out i can only rotate/scale polygons in the top/side views. is there anyway to convert the surfaces to polygons?

i was listening to the 28 weeks later soundtrack while just freeforming from scratch. i don't want to get too detailed with the polygons since i'll be using some hair/fur, but we'll see. it's going to have 1 big leg and 2 small legs on the left and one small leg and one big leg on the right side.

http://www.underattacker.com/uploads/spider1.jpg

http://www.underattacker.com/uploads/spider2.jpg

The spider is looking good so far. Maya is very similar to Max, especially in the polygons department.

To answer your question, to change from nurbs to polys go
Modify-->Convert-->Nurbs to Polygons
The same can be done with subds to polys in the menu. However, if youre using subds, you should proably stick to using the polygon mode instead of converting to polys because you'll just have a high poly mesh to deal with if you convert subds to polygons.

Thanks Anthony. Yeah I just checked and after converting, the mesh of the top piece got real messy. I think it might be best for me to recreate it with a polygon plane rather than try to fix the mess.

You can rotate surfaces in all the views too so you don't have to recreate it;)