Texturing TIE-Fighter

Using the Blinn material made the TIE-Fighter shiny compared to the default texture used. Once completed I moved to the wing. I wanted to wing to look as detailed as possible as it can potentially be the only thing viewed by the audience from the right angle.
This was achieved by using bump-mapping. Upon searching for a TIE-Fighter wing on Google I saved one and placed it on my model.

But viewing the material as the wing on the right left the metal rods coming from the centre to the edge; where I already have my own model rods created. So using Photoshop and the stamp tool I removed the rods and therefore just left the rough looking dark faces.

Bringing me to the lower image that I had edited. Although the centre was left and you can see where the stamp tool merged each section. This was no issue as I have a model over the top of the centre and the edges of each section.

Houston, we have a problem.

Upon inspection of my models, I wanted to make final tweaks here and there to perfect each one. When I opened up Maya 2016 for mt TIE-Fighter I saw this mess in the engine area. For an odd reason once I had saved everything it had messed with my edges and vertices to create this mess. I have edited it since to clean it up. But this is a noteworthy issue.

Moving and Scaling Multiple Objects

TIE-Fighter Duplicate Wings

Initially I had just duplicated all the object required to create the wing for the purpose of having two symmetrical wings and saving the time of re-creating everything from scratch. Only issue I had from this was that all the object would rotate separately and would be muddled all over the screen rather than staying attached in the correct areas.



Above is the final example of how i had done this.

 I have gone to Windows > Outliner and selected all the objects making the one wing.

Once that was done and all objects were highlighted in the outliner I used Ctrl + G to group these objects together.

This made it so when I edited the models from the group window, all objects would be edited respectively of where they were and how they were according to its arrangement.

So I duplicated the group from the outliner and from the attribute editor I had scaled it to -1 along the x-axis. This made it so the group was rotated perfectly 180 degrees and was easily translated into its correct position.

TIE-Fighter Progress part 2

Viewer Right-Side Wing:

     Trying to create the wings basic shape was easy, creating a flat cube that is elongated and cut horizontally in the center to create the hexagon. Ctrl + E to extrude the outer face to a smaller shape and extrude once again to push the smaller shape inside the wing. Repeat this process for the inner wing too (not yet completed in example below.)
     The detail in the center of the wing used the same process to create the hexagon but the outer face is resized (without extruding) to a smaller shape. Ctrl + D to duplicate the hexagon and resize then place into it proper location.
     Finally the 6 parts sticking out of the center. These were cubes elongated with one edge target welded to another edge to create a triangular prism, and then on a triangular face I target welded the 3 vertices to one to create a point. Then duplicated 5 times and pulled each vertices to the right point to translate the image correctly.




Cockpit:

A simple sphere that has been rotated 90 degrees along the y-axis.
Boolean difference the face off to create a cockpit window and then pull he face out.
The top cut off section was booleaned off and then a face was extruded to connect both areas visually. The top vents were created using cubes that were adjusted correctly and booleaned out.
The bottom guns where attached using an circle that had been transformed into an oval.

Viewer Left-Side Wing:

     The wing was duplicated and rotated separately. This has not worked well. The solution is to create a group and then rotate.

TIE-Fighter Progress

So far I have the wing and the center cockpit sorted. It far has from enough detail but it is a step in the right direction.

Skills I have improved on:

• Extruding in and out.
• Switching between select, translate, rotate and transform (using the Q,W,E,R keys).

Using Multiple Image Planes

While creating the TIE-Fighter I found that the image plane I had chosen was not quite what I wanted in its detail.
There are many benefits to using multiple image planes to create your models such as finding extra detail and re-iterating what is needed to create the source you are studying. But there are drawbacks too such as you will most likely need to resize he plane vertically and horizontally, and that the image plane could be a different variation of the model. With the below example it worked well as i wanted my visual information about the center of the wing.

Starting the Tie-Fighter

Tie-Fighter

Upto this point I had:

 Used the rotation tool to rotate the centre sphere 90 degrees so I can easily add the cock-pit window. I had used the objects tools on the right-hand side and entered the number as 90 to make sure it was accurate.

 Used the vertex tools to adjust the first wing the correct point of the schematic.

 Cut tool around the centre of the wing and pulled the edges out to create the hexagon seen for the wing. Along with the X-ray tool to see where to translate the models and how much to edit them to the correct point.

Muti-cut tool

Trying to create the inside of the Tie-Fighter I have made many cuts in an attempt to separate the edges that go from the centre to the outside of the wing.