Hello there! In this blog, I will be describing the step-by-step process of designing my chosen star wars spaceships in Maya, and outlining the methods that I used throughout this assignment.
In this assignment, we are required to design 3 different ships. I have decided to recreate the 'Imperial Star Destroyer', 'Z95 Headhunter' and the 'X-wing'. As these are all ships with notable design differences that can fully display my skills with this program.
First one will be the Imperial Star Destroyer. This ship has a reasonably flat design, resembling some sort of flattened pyramid.
First things first, we have to create the base. I decided to start this base off with a cone
We then have to rotate it to the side, and reduce the Axis Subdivisions down to 6, in order to make a lying down hexagonal pyramid.
From here, we need to re-scale the size a little bit, in order to make it more similar to the base of the ship. I initially used the 'scale' option in 'object' mode to get roughly the right dimensions, and then used the 'scale' option during 'edge' or 'vertex' mode in order get it much closer to the base shape.
(note: It's at this point that I realised using a cone would be really difficult when it came to implementing the dip that goes the perimeter of the ship. From here on, I used a cylinder instead, but did the same thing as i did above.)
From here, we have the main shape of the ship. We need to begin adding the intricacies of the ship. I started with the intend going all the way along the front and sides of the ship. I took the following steps to do this:
-Selected the 6 triangular faces on the front of the ship, and turned them all into a single editable face by deleted them all and selecting 'fill hole' to create a single square face.
-Selected the now square frontal face, aswell as the long, thin rectangular faces, and extruded them inwards slightly to get the general shape of the indent.
-From here, I cleaned up the mess that extruding inwards causes by shifting the vertexes around on the corners in order to line up with eachother cleanly.
The next part that needs making is the control centre on the top of the ship. Simply adding a cuboid to the top of the mesh will be a good way of starting this off. The control centre maintains the slightly slanted shape that the top of this ship has, so we need to add divisions down the centre of our cuboid, and then pull the outer faces down so that the shape follows the slant, like so.
From here, we will be using the 'Add divisions' function alongside the 'extrude' function to create the majority of the control centre's design. As luckily the ships control centre is fairly basic, and will allow this function to be used for the majority of this section.
There is the general design halfway done. As you can see, it's beginning to take shape. This following image shows the most complete this section will get by using only the 'add division' and 'extrude' function.
It's important to note that during this point, you can see there are a lot of extra uneeded Poly's. This is because during my attempt at creating the little 'slants' that go down the middle, of the ship, I missed it up, and I couldn't undo the entire thing far enough to fix this error.
As you can see, the control centre is still missing the large back tower. This will be made by using another cuboid, rather than trying to extend the current cuboid any further. this will make the base of the back tower.
From this point, I will add another hexagonal cylinder to the top of the base, in order to get the correct shape of the back tower. Luckily, I do not need to modify the shape of this hexagonal cylinder much in order for it to be a good replica.
There are a few intricasies on top of the tower. All of these are best built by combining multiple 'base' shapes, like a sphere, a polygon pipe, and a few spheres. I then duplicated this object and placed it on the other side of the tower. For some reason, these tower pieces raised the poly count of the entire ship by nearly 1000%! I'm not sure why this is, as all of the reasons I expected to cause this turned out to not do the same thing when I was creating the turbines (seen below)
The last remaining piece of detail required on this ship is the jet turbines on the back. As we can see by our mood board, This ship has 3 large turbines in a straight line, with 4 smaller ones all based around the central large one.
To create these boosters, I made 2 new cylinders, one for making the Larger turbine and one for the smaller ones. I then edited them in order to create an accurate shape. Note that it was difficult to make the shape of the turbines stand out properly in Maya, due to the fact it's all grayscale and the cylinders has a concave in order to create the turbine properly.
Once I did this, I duplicated the turbines and positioned them on the back of the ship as necessary.
To finish the ship off, I had forgotten to add the final detail to the top of the control tower, so I added the fairly basic T-shaped design to the top. It was at this point that I realised that it was the small cylinders in the side-designs that were causing the absurd rise in the poly count, but I wasn't sure of how to fix it without completely re-doing the whole thing.
With that last bit created, This model's base is done! All that's left is to texture the ship, which I will do in another blog later on.
The finished product:
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