Cut or Connect

Using the cut or connect tool can add extra polygons to enhance you model. In the image below I am cutting a line allowing me to create an indented face a window effect.

Boolean with an Extrude

Construction of an odd shape

Before I begin I wonder what basic shape to start with. If I see a shape with a circle I will almost certainly use a cylinder or sphere as the start shape. So I had placed it correctly according to the image plane and then I noticed I wanted a flat side to be pulled up with vertices pulled closer together. So I would use a simple cube shape to cut the clean surface out and continue just as previously stated. But it needed an inner circle extruded inside itself and that took priority as there would be a face issue to extruded inwards an circle if the face was not a circle.


From the example above you can see the end result. I have given a visual example of what i had done to create the top area of the cylinder.

1. Extrude another circular face into the cylinder.
2. Cut a cube out of it (shown by a grey box).
3. Extrude the upper flat surface up and transform the vertices closer together on the x-axis.
4. Push the smaller circular face in using the extrude tool.

UV Mapping

UV Mapping was a struggle and somewhere I would to improve.

I struggled to fix the image and vertices in the correct place as i found every time i moved one vertices another attached to the same point would also move which became increasing frustrating. I understand there are areas of this I could improve and i hope to in the coming weeks.

X-Wing Start

Cockpit

Body was created in a similar way to the TIE-Fighter wing but with extra cuts along the whole body at multiple points. Once done i created a separate object for the cock pit. This was mainly a similar way as the body with just highlighting the correct vertices and moving them to their desired location through a process of cutting around the object multiple times.
I then noticed an indent in the body of where the cockpit stand do to facilitate the cockpit i then duplicated my current cockpit and just transformed across the x-axis, this is so when i boolean difference the cockpit from body it will not cut lower than where my cockpit stands.

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.