Week Four

This week I really cracked down and got on making a full complete space ship. I decided to try the X wing as it didn't have the annoying window on the front like the Tie Fighter, and it seemed a little more challenging than the Lambda Shuttle.

As you can see, I managed to complete the one wing and the main body. I'm not very happy with the main body, as it's not symmetrical. I drew it using the plan as a form of tracing paper, and then used the extrude tool and connect tools (which I've developed a love of.) Since I drew it, it wasn't symmetrical and that bothered me for the rest  of construction. I tried to fix it by slicing the whole thing in half with the boolean tool, and then mirroring it, and joining the two halves, but it never looked quite right. Next time I'll ensure that it's perfect before extruding it.

When making the C shapes for the laser/blaster things, I cut a tube shape in half by deleting the vertices that comprised half of it. The problem with this was there was a missing polygon on the top and

bottom of the C shape, so I looked up a new tool which was cap. Cap added the missing polygon in if I selected the border option!

I'm very pleased with how the blasters, engine and wing in general turned out. I gave up on editing the engine any further as every time I tried to change it, 3DS max would crash and I was not very pleased. I have a ominous gut feeling that I'll regret using the extrude tool so frequently to make the engine and body of the blaster one large piece, however I'm not willing to touch the engine for a little while just in case the program crashes again. I'll look into cutting up the shape soon, since I think it would make adding detail to particular parts slightly easier.

I didn't actually add the three other wings to the ship as I know I can just copy and mirror the one wing I do create. It hasn't really felt complete to me yet so I'll wait until it does before I do copy it over.

The nose tip was very annoying to create as it's such an odd shape, I'm not 100% pleased with it, but I'm proud of creating it.

Another annoying feature is that clicking the lightbulb on a "group" of objects doesn't make the whole group invisible. I'm not sure if I'm missing an option or something, however so I'll look into that as well.