Simply Maya User Community - jedi fighter WIP

Some shots of my Jedi Fighter project WIP.

I have been focusing on the upper model detailing. The reference material for the under body is a little sparse and I am shopping for a model or something to get some ideas for it.

The model is based on Kurt B's tutorial. I took a different approach for a couple things.

The ship hull and canopy are nurbs trimmed surfaces. The wing was modeled using create polygon and then cut up rather then starting from a polygon plane. I created a couple of lines from the side view and projected them onto the surface and then trimmed the canopy frame, hull and window. To give thickness I just duplicated the canopy frame and hull and scaled them and then lofted nurbs surfaces across the trimmed edges.

I struggled alot with the wing and getting the compound angles correct. After hours of trying diffent things I found that creating a 2x2x2 latice was the best solution.

Some things that would be nice:

1. A way to comvert nurbs to usable polygon topologies to convert the hull and canopy to polygons would be nice. Nurbs are fast but trying to get clean uniform patches is really unrealiable. I am curious to see how the textures will layout across the seams.

2. A way to manage the axis for selected parts. That is to say when working on the wing when it was first extruded it is in the standard orthagonal xyz coordinate system. After it is oriented the way it needs to be its a royal pain in the ass to manipulate anything because the coordinate system is all catywompus and you have to move things in all three axis. It would be SO nice if you could manually set up the coordinate system so you could algn the coordinate system to suite your needs. I think I saw someone useing a locator and parenting the object to the locator to accomplish this but I can't find the details. So in most cases I find myself going back to an earlier state before the model has been angled off the default coordinate system, making adjustments in a single dimmension, then redoing every single step to get back to a later point. I want to make the indentation in the parimeter of the deeper for instance but I am dreading going all the way back to when the wing was flat the then spending hours getting it all angled properly again.