Hey,

This here is pretty much my first real Maya modeling attempt. It's nothing really special, but everyone's gotta start somewhere, right?

I modeled the casing after an actual round that I had lying around -- it's a Norma .30-06, if anyone cares. I measured up the casing, outlined half of the casing along the Y-axis using the CV Curve tool according to the measurements I made, and then I simply revolved it -- nothing too hard there. I played around a little with the lighting options and such. This rendering has two spot lights illuminating the scene: one from behind the camera and one to the right, with a lesser intensity and with shadows disabled. The shader is a basic antriscopic. I rendered the image, as a 1080HD frame, with Final Gather, Caustics, and Mental Ray on. From what I hear and read, I’ve only managed to scrape the surface of Maya’s true potential, and I’m hoping to learn a lot more.

I’m hoping to elaborate on the lighting and shading/texturing, and I would really appreciate any tips I can get in this area, as I’m still pretty much a newbie to the whole 3D scene in general.

So, what do you think so far?

Here's the Full 1920*1080 Image