Project Examples: 3D Lightsaber Model

I apologize to anyone who wants to read this blog regularly as I have not had time to update it with a proper coding post in a few weeks. I am in the home stretch of my undergraduate work. All of my classes will be completed by the end of the spring term. Once that is done, I have two projects to complete for my degree, which will both be games. I am excited and cannot wait to complete them.

In the meantime, I wanted to show off a small project I did this week for a 3D modeling class. We are using Maya 2011 for the class. The project was to model a weapon using primitive polygon modeling. Since primitive polygons are great for modeling man-made objects, and since natural curvatures take a lot more time, I decided to model a lightsaber from the Star Wars series. Bonus points to anyone who can guess which movie and hilt I used as reference, but please note that some of the finer details are missing from the model.

The next stage of this modeling project will be to work on textures, modeling a character to use the weapon, and then finally to animate the scene. I'm not an artist, but I'm happy on how this one turned out.