This is a great beginner project in sculpting with NURBS and polygons
and you'll have a lot of fun creating the rounded shapes and skin folds
on the Hippo.
We start with blocking out all the basic shapes for body and head, and
then start adding detail on the head with sculpting. You'll learn the
basis of NURBS geometry which is great for creating the shapes that
makes this model and work with the components hulls, CV's and isoparms.
We then convert to polygons and start shaping out mouth area and eye
sockets using different polygon modeling tools and extrude the geometry
for ears. To add the finer details we convert to sub d's and you'll
learn how to always keep your lowest base mesh when converting between
polygons and sub d's which is quite an important thing to know. We also
work with the sculpt geometry tool to smooth out our model.
With the head done we move on to detail work on the body to create
realistic feet for the hippopotamus and also work on sculpting out the
skin folds that define this model. We then combine and merge the head
and body to get a complete model with quads that can be rigged and
animated.
This tutorial continues with UV layout and texture painting for skin.
During the UV mapping process you'll learn some useful techniques and
work with different types of maps in the UV Texture Editor. Our final UV
map is then brought into Photoshop for texture painting a realistic
color map for the skin with pores, grooves and good color variation. We
also add a bump map to give the model a more natural feel and look, and a
spec map to get control of the specular highlights when we add some
lights to the scene.
Home Page : http://simplymaya.com/autodesk-maya-video-tutorial/modeling-and-projects/animals