Star Swars: A9 Vigilance Class Fighter

# 1 03-06-2007 , 05:42 PM

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I was playing around looking at some star wars blueprints and thought the A9 Vigilance fighter looked pretty easy, so I started working on modeling the gun today.

The fusalage basic massing was made using curves and nurbs boundry and birail-2 surfaces. I'll covert them to polygons and attach the surfaces into a single mesh.

Trying to figure out the best way to cut out the canopy and stuff.

I worked mostly on the gun today. Here are some clay renders and the reference images.

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# 2 03-06-2007 , 05:43 PM

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references images

reference images...

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# 3 03-06-2007 , 11:07 PM

Jr.Who

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Looking good, IÕll be watching.
user added image

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# 4 04-06-2007 , 05:52 AM

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GREAT
finally someone who takes on another kind of warship than the Mill Falcon or X-Wing fighter!

Keep it up.

Wanna see more!

You gonna animate it too ?

gr

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Always up for a chat !

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# 5 04-06-2007 , 07:17 AM

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060407

-converted body to polygon
-added wings
-added internal engine detail
-general cleanup

Blocking in the basic forms is almost done.

Next I need to chop up the fusalage into panels and add the cockpit detail and some more secondary detail on the hull (it looks a bit too clean).

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# 6 04-06-2007 , 07:18 AM

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front shots...

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# 7 05-06-2007 , 04:22 AM

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Here are some wireframes. Sorry about them being a bit blurry. It is hard to keep'em sharp without making the files sizes incredibly large.

The cockpit area (and the hull in general) is a bit sparse. This is just the blocking in stage. The entire hull will be changing quite a bit as I cut in the details. Right now it is just a set of nurb surfaces that have been converted to polygon and atteched.

What I really need to do is split the nurbs surfaces into proper panels then convert them to polygons then add thickness and panel details. Doing this in maya without making the surface all lumpy is a bit tricky so it will take me a while to figure it out.

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# 8 05-06-2007 , 04:23 AM

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gun wires...

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# 9 05-06-2007 , 04:24 AM

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gun closeup...blinn

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# 10 05-06-2007 , 04:31 AM

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Looking better and better man

Keep it up!

Me like!

gr
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# 11 05-06-2007 , 07:37 PM

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I like that a lot! Like was mentioned, props on picking something other than the norm(i.e. Mil Falcon or x-wing)! KUTGW

Sparticus

Expect to excell...

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# 12 05-06-2007 , 08:02 PM

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nice. looks accurate.

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# 13 06-06-2007 , 12:57 PM

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Started cutting in some hull details. Keeping surface tangancy is really hard. It is a little frustrating because it seems that there are "ALMOST" enough tools to do the job easily but nothing works as expected and you end up after long hours for frustration just pushing and pulling verts by eye. It is so tedious and I think that the technology is there to make the process much easier.

Some things that would be nice:

-Convert a trimmed nurbs surface to polygon (this would be the holy grail!).

-project all the vertices on a poly mesh onto a nurbs surface. I see no reason at all that this could not ne implemented and it would be a god send. Create a nurbs surface convert to polygon, cut and move things around and if the mesh gets cattywompus just project it back onto the nurbs surface. Or method 2 create a nurbs shell, create a poly surface all cut up with proper edge flow, then project the mesh onto the surface bingo flawless tangency and smooth surfaces.

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# 14 07-06-2007 , 10:45 AM

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totally rebuilt the body....

I was not pleased the way the body was going. So I started fresh. I took the original nurbs basic shape and projected curves onto the surface. Using these curves and isoparms from the nurbs form I created a cage of cv curves.

Using the curves I created nurbs surfaces using boundry, lofts, and birails.

I then converted the nurbs patches to polygons and extruded some thickness to each of the panels and added some edges to shore up some of the corners.

The surface tangency was pretty good at this stage (the model shape is fairly simple so that helped. But there were a couple areas where there some creases visible. I quickly hit the panels with the poly sculpt tool using push, pull, and mostly smooth got the surface into good shape.

To Do:

-Canopy
-Interior of Cockpit
-Texturing

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