#18 - Assignment Models - Jedi Starfighter 4

I have focused on creating the engines for the bottom of the model, but first I had to make sure the back of the main body was the right shape. To do this, i used the side view image to drag the edges into the right place, and then used the smooth tool to add a few more faces so that I could pull them out round it a little bit. I only smoothed the back face once because in the animation the back will not be seen close up, so a bit of a jagged shape shouldn't be noticeable. I also smoothed the bottom bit at the back, and it happened to push the side edges into the ideal place for me, so I left that how it is for now. I also decided to pull the wings up a bit, make them more symmetrical from top to bottom, because after seeing many images of the star fighter online the wings definitely should not be as low down as they were. I was able to use the new edges that had just been created using the smooth tool as a guide to how far up the wings should go, and when these edges were totally straight the wings also looked to be in the perfect place, as you can see in the image below.

Deciding to raise the wings a bit has unfortunately caused a massive drawback for me to deal with. The model no longer matches the outline on the side view image of the star fighter. However, I am pretty confident that the side view and the top view are from two completely different sources with no links, and therefore are not even of the same design. There have been noticeable differences up until now but from now on I will have to use only the top view image as the main one for reference, and anything seen from the side or the front will only be accurate if it is also accurate from the top view. Anything that can't be seen from the top view will use the side view and will be matched as closely as possible. An example of this comes with the engines. I modelled them using the side view, however when I actually aligned them they were sticking out of the body in various places. Therefore, the shape is matched to the side view image but the position is matched to the top view image, where they actually look how they are supposed to. I also used the following image to ensure that I got the shape of the point which you cannot see in the image correct, which is why the point looks like the version in the image below but the rest of it looks like the side view image, where it was visible.

http://www.starshipmodeler.com/starwars/jj_revjedi.htm

To create the engines, I used a cylinder primitive stretched out to the shape of the side-view schematic, and used the insert edge loop tool to add in rings around the cylinder at every point in the schematic where the shape gets bigger or smaller. Conveniently, the engines are perfectly round all the way along, so I was able to scale each ring entirely without distorting the shape seen from other angles. Once I had the shape of the engines, I used the multi-cut tool to add a ring on the back face of the cylinder at 20% deep. I then extruded the new faces inside this ring into the engine model to create the exhaust shape. I also used the add divisions tool to add 3 faces to every other section around the largest part of the cylinder, in the middle, so that I could extrude the inner most face and create the indents that the model pictured above has.

I then duplicated this engine and aligned them at the back of the star fighter body, in line with the top-view schematic.

I feel that the engines turned out very well, given that I had such difficulty in balancing the design across three different images, on all of which only part of the engine was visible. The positioning seems very accurate from the top view image, the size and shape seems accurate from the side view image, and the details and the point at the front of the engines look accurate from the underside image. Obviously in a couple of places I had to decide how it should look, such as the hollow engine at the back of each engine, but it looks how a standard engine might look. It looks like the engines are slightly clipped by the body at some points, however this is inevitable due to the balancing issues and it won't be visible from the distance I plan for the camera to be at in the animation so I'll leave it how it is. Now the engines are complete, and along with the two lasers I now have five different models in my scene, so I am going to group them appropriately, as shown in the next image.

The next stage will be to add the cockpit in as another separate object.