I was wondering if there was anyone here that could guide me on some techniques on hard surface modeling. Right now I am doing Kurt's mech tutorial and I have been using the split polygon tool to create the look of tight machined corners. Up until now that has been a labor intensive way to go about makeing corners sharp. I would think with the advanced nature of 3D modeling software there would be a simpiler way to do hard surface modeling for both increased speed and keeping the poly count low. For the mech using split polygon is fine but I work at CAT and I was thinking about trying to model one of our machines which is much more complex than the mech tutorial so I need to get pretty good at hard surface modeling if I want to finish by the time I retire
Anyone have any suggestions? Just yesterday I found the "offest edge loop" command and that speed's up the process a little but I spend a lot of time deleteing the edges that Maya draws incorrectly, normally the edge at the end of the loop. Here is a picture of my mech, the body is still in the initial stages and I was having a little fun with materials and rendering but its the most complete render I have right now.
