Lofting assignment

I knew it was too good to be true.

After my success lathing an object, I waited until too late to try lofting.  It was a HORRIBLE experience.  One problem after another.  I started out ambitiously, by trying to loft a submarine.  It's basically just a tube with some bits sticking out of it, right?  According to 3D Studio Max, a submarine is a freaking nightmare of splines, lines, vertices, and unpredictable results.  Like so...

  

 

As you see here, my first attempt to loft a submarine with the diving planes on the sail was a disaster.  I couldn't figure out why those lines were extending from the dive planes to the hull.  The hull itself is pinched everywhere I added a shape.  After a couple of hours fiddling with this design I gave up.  I figured maybe the vertices on the splines weren't lining up properly.  I created another design with the dive planes on the front of the hull and tried to duplicate my splines in a way that the vertices would match up.  No such luck.  Before I even got to that point, though, my simple spline was acting up on me.  I had a round spline, applied it to the path, and got a diamond shape.

Another hour of frustration until I stumbled upon Shape Steps.  I tried increasing the steps and the hull rounded out.  I'd added more vertices to the first sub, so I'd not yet tried a four vertex circle.  I couldn't find the answer to my problem in the QuickStart Guide, the Help files, or online.  Once again a simple, but obscure, button halts my entire project.   How is a user supposed to learn this program with so many land mines built into it??  It took me a few more hours to wrestle out the submarine.  I created a simple color rectangle of dark gray and red for the boat's colors.  I then used an underwater photo on two planes (one in front and one behind the boat) and bluish lights to put my clumsy submarine to sea.

Still can't figure out how to round out the nose cone.

I was so angry and frustrated during this process I banged on my keyboard tray hard enough to break it.  Phooey!  By this time it was the wee hours of the morning.  I copied a YouTube tutorial on how to loft a screwdriver.  I had run out of patience by this point.  I was angry, frustrated, demoralized, and my stomach hurt from stress.  Still I got my screwdriver.  I turned the submarine color map sideways to add color to the thing.

Still ambitious, I tried to loft a katana.  This was another exercise in rage and frustration.  The first problem was the fact that I couldn't get my shapes to follow the curved spline.

I spent time trying this and that.  Nothing worked.

Curved path, straight lofted object.

I even followed another video tutorial step by step but the guy in the video got the proper results and mine still wouldn't work.  I followed him click-for-click.  Eventually, I discovered another setting, just underneath the "Shape Steps" setting from the submarine loft.  By increasing the "path steps" I got my curve.  Still, it was another fight.  I've learned to fear my weekly homework because of this sort of stuff.  I made my katana using a couple of cross section shapes for the blade.  The tip was very difficult.  I'm sure there are some tricks to make it easier, but the documentation doesn't seem to have them.   I made a slightly larger  blade cross section on a very short spline for the habaki, the brass collar at the base of the blade where it meets the handguard  (called the tsuba)

I worked the tsuba spline into shape and just extruded it.  I tried to get the cutouts in it but following carefully the instructions on booleans did absolutely no good.  The sun was coming up so I just gave up and made it a solid piece.  The handle (or tsuka) was another short lofted object.  Building this with 4 objects allowed me to put a different texture on each.  I fiddled with some lighting to get a good metallic effect on the blade.

Next I made a plane, picked a good picture of Mt. Fuji and set it up as the background for the sword.

See that gorgeous mountain?

You don't?

That's 'cause it won't render!  Remember that submarine earlier?  I got two planes to render, one at greatly lowered opacity.  This one won't render at all.  An hour of fighting with this and I can't figure out why.  It worked fine just a few hours ago.  Class is in 3 hours and I haven't slept at all.  Here are some screenshots of the plane with the bitmap of Mt. Fujiyama on it.  It looks just fine in perspective view.  I have the materials editor set to "Show Standard Map In Viewport".  It just suddenly refused to render the background plane.

If anyone can see what small setting I've gotten wrong, please let me know.

UPDATE:

I seem to be genetically incapable of just letting things go.  Some more fiddling with the problem revealed that the Mt. Fuji image was visible from the other side.  Wha...?  All it took was rotating the plane 180 degrees and it showed up in the render window.  Gee, it would've been nice to have seen that in a Help file, dontcha think?  Anyway... sword.