3D Modeling: Chess Set (1 of 7): Pawn

Welcome to the first of many tutorials on the topic of 3D Modeling. In the next few posts, I will show you how to model a whole chess set in Autodesk Maya 2012.

The first piece I will be modeling is the pawn. Below is a reference image I took of a pawn.

First, create an image plane.

You can do this by clicking on the Polygon Plane button or by going to Create / Polygon Primitives / Plane from the top menu.

Once created, go to the INPUTS menu in the channel box on the right side of the screen. Add a value of 20 to both Subdivisions Width and Subdivisions Height.

Now that the plane has been created, open the hypershade by clicking on the hypershade / Persp button on the far left or by clicking Window / Rendering Editors / hypershade.

Once in the Hypershade, create a new lambert surface shader by clicking Maya / Surface / Lambert.

Double-click on the newly created lambert2, and then click on the checkered box next to the color channel under Common Material Attributes.

Next click on the File button under Maya / 2D Textures / File in the hypershade.

Now click on the small yellow folder button to the right of the Image Name box under the File Attributes. Select the location of the pawn image file on your hard-drive and click open.

Click on the image plane and add a value of 90 to Rotate X in the channel box. Then move it on the Z axis in the negative value until the stage is open.

Create a Polygon Cylinder by clicking on the Polygon Cylinder button under the Polygons tab or by clicking Create / Polygon Primitives / Cylinder.

Right-click and hold on the cylinder until the pop-up menu appears and select Face.

Select all the faces on top of the cylinder and delete them.

Right-click and hold on the cylinder until the pop-up menu appears again and select Edge. Double left-click on the edge loop to select the whole edge.

From the top menu, select Edit Mesh / Extrude.

Uniformly scale the edge loop to match the image plane.

With the edge loop still selected, extrude it again.

Create a sphere by going to Create / Polygon Primitives / Sphere. Move it in to place, matching it with the round top of the pawn. Right-click select the faces and delete the bottom faces of the mesh.

Select the original mesh, hold shift, and then select the sphere. Combine them into one mesh by going to the top menu and selecting Mesh / Combine.

Next, select the vertex of the top mesh with the vertex of the bottom mesh. From the Polygons menu, select Edit Mesh / Merge.