I am making a dropship for my feature film Xeline (www.xelinethemovie.com), staring Brinke Stevens. While I want this to be somewhat of an omage to Aliens, I don't want to plagerize or be derrivative, so . . . instead of using an Apache like they did in Aliens (btw, I HIGHLY recommend K. Brown's Apache tut, which is what gave me my start, https://www.simplymaya.com/movie_page...html?tut_id=81), I've always been partial to the U.S. Coast Guard's HH-65-A Dolphin, because of its cleaner lines and I really love it's enclosed rear rotor.

1. I used the instructions from a model as a reference to get the basic body shape, using a polygonal box (from nose to tail).

2. To make sure I got the rear rotor right, I modelled the tail separately using a Torus, which I rotated 90 degrees and then pulled the outer poly's to make the flatter parts of the tail.

3. I then combined the two primatives using the combine command and then merged the verticies.

4. Next I made a smooth proxy as taught in the Apache tut.

5. Since I didn't want this to be an exact replica of an HH-64-A, I took the faces on the front side of the engine assembly, extruded and scaled them down slightly. Extruded and scaled them down slightly, and then extruded them back, to create an air scoop.

6. I then took the inside of the air scop, extruded it slightly, rotated it like I learned in the Apache tutorial, then extruded it one more time downward, so if you look at it from the front, it looks like a real air intake.

Anyway. This is what I have so far. I'll keep you posted. I plan to use what I learned in Kurt's Mech tutorial (https://www.simplymaya.com/movie_page...html?tut_id=89) to make the landing feet that drop ships all seem to have. I plan to rough out the rest of the shape but then use displacement maps to do most of the detailing to keep render times reasonable, as I'm working on a home PC and not a big render farm. Not only that, this thing is really going to book, so putting a lot of modelling detail into it is going to be lost anyway (or am I wrong about that)?

Lemme know what you think, but be gentle. This is only my second real adventure on my own.