Low polygon house and creating a castle!

In my first lesson, I attempted to create the low polygon house. During the lesson I learned about a few helpful features in Maya which I will definitely use in the feature. This included the "extrude tool" which can be used to extrude faces and edges. This allows me to extend the object and manipulate its shape by adding a new face/edge to it.

The sub division tool is also a new useful feature I have learned to use in Maya. It is able to subdivide an object so that it has more faces. I found this would be useful when needing to keep halving an object evenly and it will be far more accurate than using the edge loop tool.

The edge loop tool is another handy feature I learned about which allows me to create new edges in an object.

Below is the screenshot of the house I created:

Unfortunately I was not able to complete the low polygon house. I struggled to use the edge loop tool on the roof of the house. The edge loop tool refused to create new edges and I was not able to replicate the images in the guide which prevented me from finishing the roof. I do not understand why this was happening however I wish to resolve this issue in the future.

Creating the Castle

My second task in the lesson was to create a castle. It had to contain four walls with raised battlements and ramparts, arched entrance, a watch tower on each corner and an inner keep with an entrance. It could also contain a moat and drawbridge.

I began by creating one wall with the watch towers on either side. This allowed me to duplicate these walls later and easily position them so I could have 4 walls and 4 watch towers. To create the wall I used the extrude face tool to give the wall a "castle look."  To create the watch dogs I used one cylinder and one cone. I used the extrude face tool to give the castle brick look on the cylinder as well as using the extrude face tool to extend the cylinder and put the cone on top.

Afterwards I pasted the walls and watch towers appropriately until I had 4 walls and watch towers. I began to work on the arched entrance. To create the two ramparts on either side of the gate, I used the watch tower design but deleted the cone and extruded top part of the cylinder. To create the gate I used a sphere and cube, used the boolean tool "union" to merge them and the used the boolean tool "intercept" to create a arched gate shaped hole inside the wall.

I began creating the drawbridge. This consisted of a cube with extruded faces. Nothing special was used to create this. To create the water surrounding the castle I created a thin cube and from the colour menu, I used the Apply Colour tool and applied a blue colour. I would have used a plane instead of a cube however I was getting odd issues with the plane properly displaying.

To finalise, I populated the castle by adding some small buildings which consisted of cubes for the building itself and a cone for the roof.