X - wing model part 4

I have now added the details that I need in my wing, any other details I feel should be textured on. I have also split the cylinder on the wing in half, filled the gap left and duplicated it to recreate the cylinder it war originally, I did this because the x-wings engine is actually two semi cylinders pressed together, and when the ship is flying the wins spread apart to form an x, hence the name.

Poly count

This will be a short post simply explaining my reasoning for keeping my ships with as low a poly count as possible, (preferably below 6000). The first and most obvious reason for this is for efficiency, as these models are being made with the intention to be used in an animation, and to animate a 30 second animation using 3 models with high poly counts would take an exceptionally long time to render out, especially on my personal computer, which does not have anywhere near the RAM needed to quickly render an animation of this size and complexity. So understanding my constraints was necessary for me to complete my models and animation to a satisfactory degree. This is also the reason I need to be careful of wasted faces, or faces that will not be visible due to being hidden by other faces on the model, for the sake of efficiency I should look to delete any of these faces that I find on my models. This also means being more picky about what I need to model and what would be better as a texture, so for example a panel filled with electrical wiring would not be efficient to model, so it would be better to texture the wires on , this can work in any situation as long as the camera will not be zooming into this part of the ship, as that situation would make it necessary to add more detail to any part of the ship heavily featured in the animation.
Going back to constraints I would have neither the time nor the experience in Maya that would be required to make what would be a professional level ship from star wars, so going into this assignment with those kinds of expectations would be unreasonable.

X - wing model part 3

I have now created one basic wing for my ship, without any extrusions and details that I would like to model in rather than texture. I made the wing by first making a small and simple connector between the ships body and the cylindrical engine out of a cube, then I extruded the cylinder out along the side of my wing to make it look like it does on the actual ship. The wing itself was more difficult than it look due to the fact that the new x-wings wings are not the same at the top and the bottom, which is hard to tell from the top view in the reference image, but is actually two different shapes that went flat against one another look like a single wing shape. Finally I made the guns on the ends of the wings, making this was simply a matter of following the reference image and extruding along the cylinder, changing the width when necessary, I did this rather than use multiple spheres to create more of a flowing look and to avoid the possibility of too many overlapping faces, which would increase the poly count unnecessarily. For the second gun I simply grouped the first one into a single object and duplicated, then scaled it by -1 on the appropriate axis to move it exactly opposite position.

Materials

Objects with different materials

This class practical was all about how to assign materials to object, and the different types of materials and what they are best used for. for example a blinn would be better for metals and maybe glass, whereas a phong would be better used for a plastic material.
The first excercise that we has in this lesson was to assign a sphere a color and change the specular highlight on the object, which is the colour that the reflections will show as, if you look at the purple sphere in the image above, you can see that my specular colour is a light blue
The next exercise was to apply a bitmap to several different shapes, s you can see I have used the checkered material provided on the 3 object on the left of the image above.
The final excercise of this lesson was to use procedural maps, which you can see used on both the sphere on the right and the plane on the right, you can see the shape looks very deformed, especially when compared to the other flat shapes.

The tool that I think will help me out best in the future is the ability to add an image as a material when applying a lambert, I feel like this could be extremely useful when it comes to texturing a model.

X - wing model part 2

After I made the initial basic body shape of my model, I proceeded to add Some details on to the back of my model, things which I wanted to have depth, or that I thought added something to the model, otherwise it would be more efficient to simply texture small details on to the model and add a bump map for thing with slight depth.
After I was done adding some detail to the body of my ship I made anew cube, with this new cube I made the cockpit by following the same method I used to make the body, but for the windows I extruded the faces on the cockpit to make them slightly thinner all around and add the frame to the edge of the windows, and finally I extruded them in to give the windows depth into the cockpit, to make them look like they are on my reference images.
I used the same method that I did for both the cockpit and body to make the nose of my ship as well, as long as an extrusion to create the indentation in the nose of the ship.

A very useful thing to know for this section was the tool setting, which allows you to change the axis you offset by, so you can make it relative to the world, following the normal axis, or relative to the object you have selected, so if it is faced at an angle it can move perfectly along that angle.

X - wing model part 1

The first thing I did when beginning to create my model was set my project and open a new scene, within which I set up the image planes and positioned them so that they are all aligned, this means that if I make the ship then it will line up with all of the images.

When making my model, I started by creating a polygon cube, then I used the insert edge loop tool to add vertices, allowing me to create the shape shown in the side view. After I had done that I went into the front and top view and moved vertices which didn't line up with the reference image. By doing it like this I made it much more difficult to accidentally ruin one part of the model while changing something, as I was mostly only able to edit along one axis at a time.

Modelling basics 3

Wine glass

This week we focused on using 2D tools to make 3D models. First we made a simple 2D arch using the bezier curve tool, then extruded out the object to make it 3D, then we grabbed the inside faces and extruded them in to create a mailbox type of object. The second thing we did, also using the bezier curve tool was to create the wine glass that you see in the image above, how I did this was I created a bezier curve and drew it on through the top view port, once I had created my curve, I used the revolve tool, and curved it around the z axis, the result is a fully 3D object created from a revolving 2D shape, much like what would happen if I extruded the shape myself, but this tool allows me to create a much better glass than I could model.

We also learned about three view editing in this lesson, this is a technique that I will be using when it comes to modelling, the way it works is you put a different perspective picture on each viewport, so a to scale image of the side of your ship on the side view, top for top, and front for front, the main thing to keep in mind is that all of these images are properly aligned and to scale. This allows you to make the perfect shape by aligning vertices with the image, then doing the same in all other viewports in order to perfectly replicate the shape that you are modelling around.

The bezier curve tool that we learned today was very useful, and could be used to create complex spherical structures in a simple and efficient way, you can also change the amount of edges that the curve revolves around with, making a lower poly, but ultimately more custom designer tool.