For the homework this week, after having made our skateboard and pull kart, was to make a tie interceptor, a kind of spaceship from Star Wars.
I started off with a simple sphere shape, duplicated that sphere shape with SHIFT+D and separated it with P. I rotated the second sphere 90 degrees and hid the first sphere for a moment. With the second sphere, I deleted most of the faces for it so that I was left with a plate shape.
In order to create the shape I wanted, I added some loop cuts, and then selected the edges that I wanted for my shape, and bevelled them, so that they formed the frame I wanted for the window. Then, selecting the faces that I needed, I duplicated them and separated them from the plate. I shaded smooth for both the plate and the new frame. I added a solidify modifier to the frame, shaded auto smooth, and moved the frame closer to the plate shape.
I unhid the initial sphere from before and shaded it smooth, and deleted some of the outer loop faces from the plate, just to ensure they wouldn’t be peeking over the frame. Then, on top of the initial sphere, I selected some of the faces and extruded them upwards. Then I added some loop cuts near the edge of the extrusion and moved it downwards, and finally bevelled the visible edges. In local view, I went to the solidify options and ticked “Only Rim” so that there weren’t any unnecessary faces underneath it, and then applied the modifier. Finally, I joined the sphere, the plate and the frame altogether into one object.
I once again got very focused and forgot to take too many screenshots.. however I went onto work on the wings next, so I’ll describe the process.
Firstly, I created one wing. I created a plane, rotated and adjusted it into place and added the solidify modifier to it to thicken it. I selected the edges on the top and the bottom and extruded them along the normals, and scaled them into place. Then, from those extracted fragments, I selected the edges at the side and extruded them. I adjusted some of the edges to be in the right position, selected the top and bottom edges and moved them to the side so that the wing bent inwards. Then I moved some of the vertices down using vert slide to create more triangular looking shapes in the front parts of the wings. I did the same thing at the back a little to add some more shape to the wing.
Then, to create the outer frame, I simply inset the inner and outer faces of the wing and extruded them inwards! I then added a mirror modifier to the wing, and set the object to mirror as the sphere – thanks to this, I didn’t need to worry about duplicating the wing or aligning it or anything like that, as it automatically aligned as I moved it.
As for the connecting parts between the main body of the tie interceptor and the wings, I also started off just creating one. I added a cylinder, giving it 8 sides so it looked more like a ship part. I rotated it and got rid of the faces either side as they weren’t really needed, and moved and scaled the cylinder into place, using the x-ray tool to help me place it where I wanted it between the main body and wing. When I felt satisfied with the placement of this cylinder, I added some loop cuts and extruded part of the cylinder down, and then added a loop cut to that part and scaled down the loop to make it get slightly smaller in the middle.
Finally, I added another cylinder, made it pretty flat and got rid of the face i didn’t need, inset the other face and merged it at centre, and put it in the place where the main body and the handle part met. I shaded it smooth and auto smooth, bevelled the edges a bit, shaded the rest of the handle smooth and joined all the handle parts together so that they were one object.
I selected the handle, and then the wing that it was attached to, right clicked and selected “Copy Modifiers”, so that it was now also mirrored to the sphere in the middle.
Next, I added some guns to the tie interceptor by inserting a cube, moving the edges up to fit with the sphere, and copying the modifiers from the wings like I did with the handles. I added two extra cylinders, doing the same thing as with the other cylinders, ie. getting rid of the face I don’t need, insetting the other one and merging at centre.
I moved the two cylinders into place, joined them together, and duplicated them so that they were also on the wings of the tie interceptor. I copied the mirror modifier for the guns on the wings from the wings themselves, and as for the guns at the front, I copied the mirror modifier from the cube. And with that, the shape for the tie interceptor was done! All I needed to do now was add some materials and animate it, so I got to work.
I looked up a tie interceptor and was using a variety of google images as my references. They all looked slightly different, so I decided to take some creative liberties when colouring my tie interceptor. I ran into some issues along the way, including struggling with the black stripe that I wanted to create going around the main body. To colour it how I wanted to, I needed to mess around with the edges of the interceptor a bit. I also struggled a bit with the window, as you can see here, but thankfully overall I didn’t run into too many issues.
Overall, I had a lot of fun colouring the tie interceptor in my own way. I combined all sorts of different styles to create my own sort of design, and I enjoyed putting my own little spin to things.
Next, I tried my best to try to animate this tie interceptor so that it looked like it was flying around! What I did for that was I created a Bezier circle, scaled it and angled it, as that circle would determine the trajectory of my tie interceptor. I selected the main body of the ship, went to Add Object Constraint, added Follow Path, and set the target as the circle. I ticked “Follow Curve” and messed around with the axes so that it would follow it the way I wanted it to. I set the ship’s offset to 0.000 and pulled up my timeline in order to animate the tie interceptor.
At the offset option, I selected the keying option, so that when I moved the ship, that would be set as a new key in the timeline. Then I moved my timeline to the very end and set the offset as 100.000, and now when I pressed play, it went in a circle. However, what it was doing was slowly stopping and starting each time, when what I wanted was a constant loop. I went into graph editor, selected everything, and set the interpolation mode as linear. Now it went in a perfect loop! In order to make it loop faster, all I had to do is make the timeline end earlier.
Then, just to polish things up a bit, I set keys for the spaceship’s rotations, just to make it look neater along the curve, as it didn’t fully curve like how I’d want it to in some places. I also wanted to use a nice space background for it to fly around in, so I found a space HDRI pack online and used an image from that!
[ The space pack was made by PixeledAsteroid on Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sksfsOSlGkQ&t=63s ]
When I was done, I had ended up with a result that I was actually really happy with! Other than the fact that the movement could have possibly been a little bit smoother, I think it turned out looking really well.
In conclusion, this project was actually a lot of fun to make! As I mentioned in the post, I got very focused at points and I’m generally super happy with how it turned out. The more and more things I model, the more confident I feel using Blender and understanding 3D modelling as a whole, and I’m excited to see what’s next.