Tie Fighter - Added Detail

Being a bit unhappy with the detail on the main body of the tie fighter I went back and had a look at my schematic and saw that I could add something to both the top and bottom of the model. Using the booleans difference tool I cut away at a sphere to create a small dome shape, I then further cut into that using some modified cube primitives to create the parts shown below.

I also added some minor detail that I saw on my schematic image onto the pylons leading to the wings using a few cube primitives and mirroring them to fit as needed.

Tie Fighter - Reflection

Now that I have finished creating my tie fighter I decided to review the process of making it. Overall I think it went well, I did not run into any problems whilst making it there were only a few minor incidents when I did not know quite how to make something, but after a few minutes of planning I was able to figure it out. However I think that I could have done better if I had added more detail to the cockpit as it does look quite bare, once my other models are finished I will go back to it and add in some more detail.

Tie Fighter - Finishing the Cockpit

I finished the cockpit by adding on the engines along with some small basic detailed shapes on the front and rear. The engines were created using pipe primitives, one was attached to the hull and angles slightly towards the wing whilst the other was face the same direction as the engine. I target welded the vertices together to create a smooth shape. The small detail was done by extruding a flattened cube primitive and manipulating the edges to create the angled parts.

Tie Fighter - Pylon and Wing Detail

I have finished the wing and pylons by adding more detail to them and I am happy with their final look. I added in an external ring around the wing along with some extra plates on both sides and extruded some structural beams from these to the outer ring of the wing. For the  pylons I added in the rest of the structural parts to complete the look, these were done using simple primitive shapes that were manipulated to the correct shape and extruded to create the desired look.

Tie Fighter - Basic Pylon and Wing

Now that the basic cockpit is done I have started to work on the structural pylon and wing on one side of my tie fighter. As it was with the laser cannons I started out with a cylinder and created the shape that I needed and then added some smaller cylinder shapes to finish the pylons basic shape. The wing started off as a cube primitive that I added in 2 extra edges that I then pulled outwards to create the wings hexagonal shape.

Tie Fighter - Laser Cannons

The 2 laser cannons on the front of the tie fighter have been completed, they are very basic and thus did not take long to do. I first created a cylinder and resized it according to the schematic I was using, then I did the same with a sphere primitive and combined that with the cylinder to create a rounded end to the cannons. Once this was done all that was left to do was add a few more cylinder shapes to the cannons and it was completed.

Tie Fighter - Cockpit Detail

Creating the detail on the front of the tie fighter was quite challenging, what I managed to do was create a pipe primitive stretch the faces to create a thin structural ring, I then duplicated this and shrank it down to form the inner ring along with deleting a few unnecessary edges to get the desired shape. Using the inner ring I inserted and extra face using the add divisions tool, I then resized the face and extruded this face to meet the outer ring and continued to do this for all the extra faces.

Tie Fighter - Basic Cockpit Shape

I have begun working on the basic shape for the cockpit of my tie fighter, using a sphere primitive I simply deleted a few edges to make the front look less rounded and extruded both the front and rear. After this I created a cube primitive and made it into the shape I desired, I then aligned it into the position I wanted and duplicated it in order to have 4 of them. Using these 4 shapes I cut into the top of the cockpit using the booleans difference tool to create the shallow grooves in the top.

Tie Fighter Practice

I have started work on a practice model of my tie fighter model this morning, I have completed the basic shape and a little bit of basic detail of the wings. Currently it has taken around 2 hours which is longer than expected, this was mainly due to trying to figure out the best methods to create the shapes that I wanted. Thankfully apart from that there have been no problems with creating what I needed once I figured out what tools to use and how to go about doing it, admittedly a lot of this was down to trial and error. One minor annoyance that keeps cropping up is my inability to align and snap different shapes to each other at times, to rectify this I aim to do some more research on the various snap to and alignment tools available in Maya 2016. Overall I think this practice run has helped me to better understand a way to create my tie fighter.