Requirements
In this class exercise, we are asked to model a sombrero based on polygenal primitives.
Readme
The key technique used are soft selection and extrude. The main steps are first creating a flat cylinder, extracting out the cap and then extruding the brim.
To begin with, I selected a cylinder as the starting point to create the model because the basic material of sombrero is a straw mat which can be made by a squeezed cylinder. So I added a cylinder polygon primitive to the scene, reduced the Scale Y and increased Scale X and Scale Z to make it look flat. Here I need to set subdivisions carefully to consider both level of details and ease of handling jointly, so I set Subdivisions axis to 50, Subdivision Caps to 10 while Subdivisions Height to 1 only.
Second, I used Soft Selection to extract out the cap. Since the Scale X and Scale Z are 3, I set the Falloff Radius to 2.5 to cover most part of the cylinder. The Fallout curve is selected to mimic the shape of sombrero presented in the class slides. One last thing to mention in this step is that the 4x4 panel layout is a better choice because we can both easily select the center vertex and watch how the cap pops up from the straw mat.
The next step is to extrude the brim. To this end, we should slope the brim upward a little so that we can draw out the brim in upward direction. The shape of the brim can further be adjusted by scaling the brim faces using the loop selection method Prof. Jörg taught us in the class.
Some final decorative work can be done, e.g., depressing the cap at the top and warping up or down the brim as shown in the slides. These decorations were implemented using soft selection too. In addition, remembering some hot keys in Maya is no double helpful to efficient modeling work.