Grid Tutorials Chapter 2 - Building a boat - Part 1

Riding on a boat is good, but building one yourself is even better! Welcome to the next chapter in our Grid Tutorial series, where we're going to take a look at how to model a basic boat, made out of polygons. Not only that, but this tutorial will be accompanied by a six-part video tutorial which will follow the entire progress step-by-step.

Chapter 2 - Building a polygon boat
Part 1 - It all started from a cube

Now it's time to do some more serious modelling. In Chapter 1 we took a look at some of the basic operations and ways to work in a three dimensional environment, but the models we created back there seemed to be a little to simple.
As someone said in the past: "playtime is over!" Let's start building our boat.

This is the link to the video tutorial of part 1 - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eMKRuliXtYc
Be sure to always keep up with what's shown on the video, so that you can better understand how to follow the instructions in this article. Pause the video, if you have to, and make sure that you keep the work organized.

Like it is shown in the video, everything starts off with a cube, which we will cut in half, so that we can later mirror it.
Select one of the vertical faces of the cube and start extruding outwards four times. This is the body of our boat.
From here on, select the vertices or edges on the bottom side and move them until you get the desired shape. The same goes for the ones forming the deck.
Always pay attention to the shape of the boat, so that you do not get too many sharp edges - we want the shape to be smooth.

Like in the video, after doing most of the adjustments, it's time to start working on the cabin. Go to a side view and use the loop cut tool to create a new edge which goes all the way from the front to the bottom of the ship. Select the two polygons, like in the video, and extrude them upwards, until you get to a certain height.

For the roof of the cabin, it's time to select the edges at the top. Extrude them outwards, but not too much. Also, remember to first select and extrude the edges on one side and after you're done with those then go to the next group.
You will notice that the vertices at the corners are not connected at all. So what you should do is select the three vertices at the corners and create a face between them (it will be a triangle).

The roof is almost done. The only thing remaining is to select all the faces creating the roof and extrude them slightly upwards. Before finishing, be sure to check one last time that there are no "empty" polygons below the roof. If they are, then select three or four vertices and then create the faces between them.

This concludes the first part of the "Building a boat" tutorial. See you next time.