Learn to Model a Cartoon Snail in Maya LT

We begin by bringing in our reference image.

Using curves and extrude we build the top part of the shell.

We build the bottom part of our shell by extruding the edges and shaping our points to the reference image.

Using the basic box primitive we create the top and bottom pieces for our head.

Next, we will connect the top and bottom meshes using the bridge tool and continue sculpting our head.

We finish modeling our head, added nice cheeks and then started on our eyes.

In this lesson we connected our eye mesh to the head.

We finish sculpting the eye and continue by mirroring our geometry to the other side.

We will extrude the necessary geometry out of our head mesh to create the basic body base shape.

Add more resolution to our base mesh.

We add volume to our base shape and continue sculpting by following the reference image.

Finally we extrude the teeth on our adorable snail character, build the tongue, and clean up our outliner.

We start with the shell, then move to unwrapping the tongue and the eyes.

We continue to unwrapping our character and learn about hiding and showing a specific selection of polygons.

Lets export our beautiful uvs out of maya and quickly paint them in Photoshop.

We will build a basic skeleton using joints in order for us to animate our snail.

We use the bind skin tool and then make a few small adjustments using the paint skin weights tool.

We will create a silly idle animation for our cartoon snail character.

Finally, lets add a walking animation.

Yay! You did it, congratulations... now you must practice your newly learned skills and make your own awesome characters! :)

Lets create a cool 360 turntable of our model then save it to a movie file via playblast.