In this lesson you were introduced to the basic techniques related to lofting curves to create NURBS surfaces:

• You made a salt shaker with two surfaces: a body made from lofted curves and a cap made from an altered sphere. An advantage of creating a separate surface for the cap and base is that you can easily give each a different color or texture, for example, one chrome and the other marble. Another advantage of creating a separate cap is that you can animate the object separately. For example, you could choose to animate the cap unscrewing from the shakerBody.
• You used a Loft operation rather than a Revolve operation to create the body. The vertical corrugations on the surface would be impossible to create by revolving a curve.
• You can alter the position of the profile curves and the shape of the shaker will update because of the construction history. If you’re certain you won’t change the body’s shape by editing the shape of the lofted curves, you can delete the body’s construction history to quicken Maya’s processing of your interaction with the surface. (For a surface as simple as the salt shaker, deleting the history won’t boost processing much.)
• There are many other useful tools for creating and editing surfaces. For a glimpse of the possibilities, take a look at the Surfaces menu and the Edit NURBS menu.

If you want to learn more about a particular tool or feature that has been presented in this lesson, please refer to the Maya Help.