I had decided that my three models for my modules work would be a Tie Fighter, Imperial Shuttle and a Star Destroyer. This all fit with my animation idea that there would be three Tie Fighters escorting an Imperial Shuttle towards the Star Destroyer before breaking formation when it got close.
I thought the Tie Fighter would be an easy model to create because it was very basic shaped but each time I tried to start either Windows or Maya would crash, this was easily fixed by opening Maya and then leaving it for a couple of minutes as it seems it was caused by Maya loading still.
The first problem I had with the Tie Fighter was that I didn't exactly know how to turn a cube into a irregular hexagon so I had decided to start on the main body and cockpit instead but again I didn't know how to manipulate a sphere in the same way as a cube. This was solved by looking at YouTube tutorials on the different tools within Maya and this helped me understand it is very similar to the cube if I rotated the shape first so that the origin points were on the front and back instead of top and bottom. This new view allowed me to extrude the outer window of the ship and I destroyed the center of the extrusion and created a hole. I found a fill hole tool that filled the hole in with a near perfect circle which was better as I could use another tool that I had learned about to cut the circle to how I wanted, creating extrusions and pulling out the window frame shape on the front of the ship.
Multi-Cut became my most used tool for this model as the divisions tool wasn't doing exactly what I wanted it to do as sometimes it either wouldn't let me use the linear function of the Divisions tool or it wouldn't let me use the tool whatsoever for some unknown reason.
Once the body was basically done I started on the creation of the wings. This became very easy to create with the Multi-Cut tool as I could cut anywhere on the shape to how I wanted it, I also learned by accident that I could control the precision points of the start and end cuts by holding control, this allowed me to place the points within 10% steps on an existing edge, making it a ton easier to make even shapes and cut outs. Using the extrusion tool to push in the inner wind parts I finished the wing and applied a black texture to the inner wing so that I could recognize the object better. Because the object was only extruded to how I liked on one side, I used the mirror tool to speed up the process of replicating the design on the other side and used the duplicate tool to create a second wing.
The struts were annoying to create as for some reason neither my Multi-Cut tool or the divisions tool would work how I wanted it to on the cylinder shape. I did have a happy accident with this though as it added extra accidental detail to the outer part of the strut to make it look like it had ridges on a bit that was extruded inwards.
The engine of the ship was made of a cylinder and I used the Multi-Cut tool to create a smaller cylinder on the end of the cylinder to at 50% divisions on each of the end of the cylinder, extruding it inwards and creating another circle to extrude outwards and adding a blue colour to produce a cheap effect of the engine running.
The two cannons are made of Cylinders and a Cube that have just been stretched and cut then scaled down to the size of my ship. I created this in large because I wanted to get a finer precision on the cannons placement on the stretched cube. Maya allowed me to shrink them all together and move them onto the ship with no problem.
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