I've been hammering away on Maya for probably five months (on and off) with little to no success. Since this is the easiest modeller (as in I can actually create *something*), I'm going to stick with it. To aid in this, I'd like a few questions answered, please.

1. After browsing through the WIP section, how do you create such smooth shapes? Is it through using NURBS instead of polys (using the "moulding" technique?)

2. How do you create those white/greyscale renders that look almost photorealistically solid? If its to do with render res, I don't know how to set the render globals to more than 640x480.

3. When viewing my model with hardware texturing on, why are the textures so blurred? This changes to normal when rendering. Is it my hardware? (ATI Radeon 9700 Pro 128MB)

4. How do you subdivide a face so one face is, say, split into four faces?

5. Are booleans a bad idea to create more complex shapes?

6. I've tried that UV mapping video tutorial (the one with the dice). How do you map textures to more complex shapes?

7. When shifting vertices about I get a pink warning message in the bottom right of the GUI. Should I not be manually shifting vertices around?

Sorry for all the questions. I've been storing them up.

Jon.