Week Seven - Final Models (and finishing the lambda shuttle)

Lambda Shuttle

In addition to finishing my ships, I had a ton of work to do on my Lambda shuttle. I was sort of putting it off because the round edges on everything was quite a scary prospect. I shouldn't have left it so late, but I completely remade the body, and the head. I'd been overcomplicating it before with the cylinders attached to the cube and MSmooth tool and everything. I went back to basics and started again, but this time I used a Chamfer box. I converted it to an editable poly, and used the scale tool to grab and manipulate just the curved areas around the edges. This gave the body of the ship a very pleasing shape. and also removed roughly 2000 polygons, which was just crazy.

Before and after shots of the body:

It was fairly easy adding the wing, and at this point I'd not remade the head of the ship as I'd left it to one side after testing out a very light curve over the top of it with the chamfer tool. However, later on I'd remake it too to give it a wider and more sturdy metal feel instead of just a flimsy thin covering. I like the shape of the new headpiece a lot more than the old one, and it allowed me to fix a lot of the problems with the first headpiece where it wouldn't fit onto the 'neck' that well, or work particularly well with the chamfer tool.

Left: Final, Middle: Work in progress Right: First headpiece.

I feel like the left one obviously has a more pleasing shape to it, and since I'd built it with quite a bit more experience than the first time I was able to make it much nicer to work with. I'd made the mistake of deleting a lot of edges and vertices and so on from the first one, and I could build this one without having to make that same mistake.

I was very proud of myself when I made the vent on top of the ship, it required quite a bit of forethought to make it, and quite a lot of aligning and boolean.

After I'd made the base shape of the ship, with the body and main parts of the wings completed, the rest was quite easy. I'd use the autogrid tool to add on detail, and then just drag vertices, faces, edges etc. and mirror it as required. Probably the hardest detail to do was the panels on the bottom wings because they were at a 45 degree angle, autogrid didn't seem to like it that much and I had to rotate a lot of the pieces to line up. It was hard and frustrating work, but seeing the completed ship made it worth it in the end. 

Final Ship Evaluation

Lambda Shuttle

I hadn't left myself heaps of time to complete all the detailing on the lambda shuttle, and I should have allocated myself more time to do it. I'm not really that happy with the job I did on the underside, however I'm not intending to show the audience the underside in the animation, so I'm not too worried. I did really like the look of the detailing I did on the backside of the ship though, with the hubs and pipes connecting them. I thought that it was simple but effective.
As with all the ships, I feel like I matched the source material really well with the proportions, mainly because I used the blueprinting technique that Steve showed us in the lecture. So most of the main proportions are correct for ALL the ships. However especially on the Lambda Shuttle, I did have to make some adjustments as the blueprints didn't seem to look quite right compared to other images of the ships, so I did make some adjustments there and perhaps the middle section of the lambda shuttle the trapezoid section in the middle of the main body could have been improved, but it looked tall enough in some material and too small in others so I'm fairly unsure.

Tie Fighter

 If I had to do the Tie Fighter again, I wouldn't merge the layers of the wings into one object. That would be the biggest change I would make. Perhaps I would also add some more detail to the underside too. Also I feel as though I've wasted a lot of polygons on the tiny vents I created around the wing hubs. It feels like there should have been a much more polygon efficient way to get the vents to look good, but in the interests of time I simply went with making a small vent and putting it into place on the wings. I had to make an alteration here from the source material. In the original Tie Fighters, the vents on the wings are just to one side. I tried this on my Tie but it made the hexagon look slanted, so I made the decision to place them in the middle between each 'spoke' on the wing, and I think it looks a lot better. I'm still very happy with the arms on the wings, and I really feel like I've come a long way since my awful Tie Fighter on week one (or two, maybe?)

X-Wing

Out of all three models, I'm probably most attached to my X-Wing, even though I think my Tie Fighter might be better. The main issues I had with the X-Wing were the underside of the wings (For some reason the boolean tool wouldn't cut indentations into them, so I decided to make them stick out slightly instead,) the back part of the engines which look slightly bare, and the curving of the long nose of the ship. I tried to make the nose of the ship as perfectly as I could, but it just wouldn't look right when I'd straighten it out, so I left the curve in. The tip of the nose is exactly the same as from the first attempt many weeks ago, it was so difficult to make the first time I refused to remake it, but I think it looks perfectly fine. The guns are also the same, if slightly squished (and with a little more detail). The cockpit was so difficult to get right in relation to the raised platform with R2D2 behind it. In every image it's slightly different. I found a way to make it look nice and went with it. The body of the ship is slightly narrower than the blueprints to accommodate the cockpit, but I think it works well. I'd like to redo the underside of the wings, but I think with materials applied they'll look a lot more acceptable.

Overall my time spent with 3DS max so far has been a rollercoaster. The constant crashes and backtracking because of this has made me hate the program, but I really love how it all just seems to work (when its not crashing). Working with editable polys is actually quite intuitive and nice, because as I said it just works exactly how you'd naturally try to use it. The only exception to this is not being able to weld two points that aren't on the same face, but it's an easy workaround. I think in the end it was worth it because making these ships has really opened my eyes to how much time it must take people to make humans or monsters, and even better versions of the ships I've made. I'm looking forward to animating, as the camera and lighting seems just as intuitive (minus the shadows being off by default).