Modelling a rocking chair in Maya

Firstly I started with making the long horizontal back legs of the chair. Firstly what I did was insert a polygon cylinder and then I made it larger. Then under Poly Cylinder History in the polyCylinder1 tab in the Attribute editor, I increased the Subdivision Axis to 40 and the Subdivision Height to 30. I then went into Edge mode and shift-selected the top edge of the cylinder and then I went into "Edit mesh" and then clicked on "Bevel"- this helped to give the leg some shape. Then in the Attribute editor, under polyBevel1, I changed the Offset value to 0.4 and the Segment value to 8. I then went into face mode and selected a group of faces near the top of the cylinder and then I pressed R to scale them in a little, next I went into edge mode and shift-selected the edge under the area I just scaled in and moved it up a bit. I did the same with the 3 edges beneath the edge I just moved.

Next I went into Face mode and went into Front view and I drag-selected the middle row of faces that I just moved, pressed R then scaled them in. Then I selected the edge above the edge where I selected the faces, moved it up a little by pressing W so that is was roughly in the middle between the edge above and below it and then I went into "Edit Mesh" and then clicked on "Bevel". Then I added 2 edge loops above the edge that I just bevelled and then I went into face mode and selected the faces between the edge loops I just inserted and pressed R and then I scaled them out. Next I went into Edge mode and double-clicked on the edge under the bevelled edges and I went into "Edit Mesh" then clicked on "Bevel" again. Then I went into Face mode and selected the long faces under the bevelled edges and I pressed R to scale them in.

Then I went into Edge mode again and selected the 3 edges beneath the faces I just scaled in and I pressed R and scaled them out and then I selected the edge under the scaled out edges and scaled that edge in a little. Next I selected the edge that was in the middle of the edges I scaled out, pressed R and scaled that in a little. Then I went into Face mode and selected most of the faces under the last scaled out edge, pressed R and scaled them all in slightly.

Next I went back into Edge mode and selected the edge under the edge that was part of the scaled in faces and I selected another edge, 2 edges below. Then I pulled those 2 selected edges in by pressing R then scaling them in.

I then started putting my attention to the bottom of the leg. So I went into Vertex mode and drag-selected the bottom 4 rows of vertices and pulled them in, then I selected the bottom 3 rows of vertices and pulled them in as well, then I drag-selected the bottom 2 rows of vertices and pulled them in and finally I selected the bottom vertices and pulled them in too- this gave the bottom of the chair a more "pointy" look. Next I went into Object mode and selected the leg, pressed R and stretched the leg up to make it longer. Then I went into Edge mode and selected the middle 3 edges that made up the 2 scaled out edges and used the Bevel tool to bevel them as well. Then I went back into Object mode, selected the leg and then I shift-right clicked and selected Smooth to see what the object looked like when smoothed. Next I selected the leg while still in Object mode and pressed R and scaled it in a little to make the leg thinner and then I stretched it up again.

Next I selected the leg again and pressed "Ctrl+D" to duplicate the leg and then I placed the duplicate next to the orignal leg, but leaving a bit of a gap. Then I started to create the segments to put between the legs. I started doing this by inserting a polygon cube which I then made bigger and made it the shape of a large rectangle. Next I went into Edge mode and selected the edges around the rectangle and used the Bevel tool on them, I then changed the Segment value to 7 and the Offset value to 0.703 (based from what I saw in a tutorial). I then went into Object and slotted the rectangle between the legs and placed it near the top the legs. I then made some scaling adjustments so that the rectangle wasn't too thick and it wasn't too long. I then duplicated the rectangle and placed the duplicate roughly around the middle inbetween the chair legs.

Then I started to create the top, larger segment between the chair legs. I started doing this by creating another polygon cube then making it larger, like a rectangle, similar to the other smaller segment. Next, under the polyCube2 tab in the Attribute editor, I changed the Subdivision Width to 20 and the Subdivision Height to 4. Next I went into the Front view and went into Vertex mode and selected the 9 middle vertices on the rectangle, pressed W and moved them up a bit and then I extended the middle 3 vertices. Then I selected the outer vertices on each side and moved them down a little and then I moved the 2 outermost vertices on each side down a little. Next I drag-selected the bottom 2 rows of vertices and moved them up.

This was as far as I successfully went with creating the model as I had a bit of trouble with the next step when bevelling the 4 edges around the segment and then creating the subdivsions as they were too close together instead of being more spaced out like what I saw in the tutorial. So overall I made the 2 back legs of the chair and part of the top large segement. This was also the first time I used the Bevel tool which was interesting to use but so far this was the only 3D model I made which I didn't have that much struggle with in the beginning steps.