VFX Modelling My Ship In Maya

As part of modelling my assets for my short film I have finally finished the design of my spaceship.
Although I'm very happy with how my spaceship looks I have run into a couple of problems throughout the modeling process.

The first problem that I encountered was with the ships UV map. After I had created the UV for the ship I successfully applied it and continued to work o other aspects of my model, however, upon opening the most recent scene at that time I realised that the texture appeared to be out of place on the ship. I noticed this as while I was going over the design of the ship I noticed that the wings, underside and aerials of the ship had white stripes running along them. My UV map however, showed no signs that the texture had been moved out of place and the nets of each shape on the map were lined up perfectly with the texture I had put on them.  This problem could only be fixed by me remaking the UV map and redesigning the whole thing again.

Another problem I encountered was that after i had combined all of the pieces of my ship I realised that for some reason the red strips going up and along the 4 wings weren't in line with each other and were not symmetrical. On closer inspection I realised that when I had duplicated two of the original wings to translate over onto the other side of the ships body I had not translated them in such a way that would make them equal. Due to this mistake two of the wings were facing the wrong way and due to the subtle bends in each wing I had not realised until the ships components had all been combined. This however was easily rectifiable. 

A technique that I've been taught in this module that I've found extremely valuable was the use of the glow effect in Maya. By creating various coloured lamberts and changing the glow and iridescence of the texture I was able to make different parts of my spaceship glow when rendered. 

By changing the glow levels and iridescence of each lambert I was able to experiment with different levels of glow and the effects that they created on the ship.

In any future projects that require us to model mechs I will definitely be taking advantage of this new skill again as it had created just the effect I was looking for with my spaceship.
I may even try and use this effect with organic based models such as plants and animals to see what results it will give me.