Making the TIE-Fighter (Part 2)

Making the TIE-Fighter (Part 2)

In my last post I talked about how i started my TIE fighter and the techniques used to create it up until the program crashed loosing my progress. 

In this section I used what I learned last time to quickly rebuild the initial model down from about 3 hours to roughly over an hour which for a first Maya model i would assume is very good.

Unlike the last time where i used the extrude tool to pull the frame out as is, this time i resized and created new devisions to allow me to create thinner frames and a rounder window on the TIE fighter as a whole.
I took a new approach in building the joining struts in which I pulled out the square section on the body with a cylinder shape attached and molded onto each side.

This was then mirrored to create both the side struts of the object. The reference image used here
I used the reference image to determine how long and how wide each strut should be as opposed to the body of the main ship.

Wings:

Each wing started out as a square where it was SLICED and then pulled outwards to create a hexagon shape which would be the base of the wing. Each strut across the wing is a separate object. First the base cylinder was added to the center of each side using the scale tool and extrude a smaller cylinder then protrudes outwards from it to create a center joining mechanism on it. 

Each strut is created using a single cuboid which is resized and pulled to create each strut, these are then positioned in the correct place before being resized and the corners bent to fit along the form of the hexagons base. 

The wing is then duplicated and copied to each side then scaled inwards to reduce the width, based on the reference images the wings are thinner than i initially made them, where i had to re-scale them to be thinner and more appropriately fitting with the model.

The wing is finally mirrored onto both sides and adjusted to give a reasonable gap between the wing and the base using the adjoining strut. This allowed me to make the distance bigger easily by simply increasing the length when needed against the reference image to make it look good.