Before modeling anything, it is important to gather and study good reference material. It is also helpful to create templates for use in your modelling program. A good underlay will provide the modeler with exact dimensions and subtle detail that might be overlooked if modeling from memory.

In this tutorial, we will import a template to use as our modeling underlay and apply it to an image plane in Maya. An image plane is a 2D object that is perpendicular to a particular camera view in Maya. The bitmap image (template) is connected to this image plane and aligned in the world space by editing the image plane’s attributes. Once this is set up, the modeling process is ready to begin.

The modeling technique used for the pill bottle requires that we provide one half of the bottle’s profile. We will begin by placing control vertices at key points along this profile to create a curve. Once completed, the curve can be edited to correct for anything missed in the drawing process, and CVs can be moved so that the curve more closely matches the profile in the underlay. This profile curve will be used as the input for a revolve operation to generate the surface.
We will also organize the project by naming the objects and assigning them to their own display layers.

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