Week 12 Pt.3 - What Would I Do Differently

In this final blog post, I will list a few things that I could have done differently in my animation, ways I could have improved it, and so on.

• The TIE Phantom was made facing the Z-axis, while my other ships were made facing the X-axis; this created a problem when animating in Maya as I had to rotate the Phantom 90 degrees. Next time, I will ensure that all my models are made facing the same way, to make it easier to animate them.
• Even with the rocks, the terrain is noticeably flat and featureless; this could be solved using bump-mapping to create more rugged-looking surface terrain. I also feel that I could have modelled the rocks more realistically, had I had the time.
• I had initially wanted to animate a scene with the TIE Fighters shooting at the Y-Wing, but felt this was too complex and removed it. However, I feel that the animation is too slow-paced, and that the addition of the shooting scene could have increased the amount of action and tension in the scene. I also feel that, given the skills I have learned while creating this animation, I would have been able to incorporate this scene into the animation.
• I never actually got around to adding the motion blend in Scene 3, so the TIE fighters do not bank as they perform their respective U-turns. This, however, makes their movement seem more unnatural, and thus more threatening, so is not entirely a bad omission.

Week 12 Pt.2 - The Final Touches

I will start this post by providing a link to my final storyboard: it can be found here.

With my scenes finished, all that remains is a few finishing touches. First is the explosion effect in Scene 6. Inspired by another classmate's example, and pressed for time, I decided to implement a much simpler explosion effect within Maya itself, using an orange sphere with its "glow" setting set to maximum. By using keyframes I was able to make it appear when the Defender hit the rock face (at which point the Defender would correspondingly disappear), and then slowly expand and fade away. I had to look up how to make an object fade out; it is a simple matter of setting keys on its material's Transparency setting.

Fig.1: A still from a VLC Media Player playback of Scene 6, with the exploding Defender clearly visible.

Looking carefully at Fig.1, one will notice that the nooks around the explosion are still in shadow when the explosion should be casting light upon them. To correct this, I will create a spherical Area Light positioned at the centre of the fireball, and animate it in a similar manner so that the intensity fades over time.

Next, I felt that my existing scenes were too empty and featureless, and needed background scenery. I thus populated Scenes 2, 3, 4 and 7 with small, simple rocks scattered around the area to make the terrain look more realistic. I obtained the textures for the rocks from this website.

Fig.2: Scene 2 as it looks with rocks for added scenery. As another minor change, the skydome material has been changed to a surface shader, making it consistent with the other scenes.

With the updated scenes rendered, I then set about importing them into Windows Movie Maker to create the final movie. The final scene fades into a credits scene that simply reads "Created by Ryan Nurse".

My 30-second animation is now complete, and ready to be handed in.

Week 12 - Into the Final Stretch

It is now time to put the finishing touches on my animation. First, I re-did Scene 4 to take into account the TIE fighters' positions at the end of Scene 3; as the TIE Defender ended up alongside the Y-Wing, I also edited the scene to make the Defender repeatedly swipe sideways at the Y-Wing as though trying to ram it, adding to the drama of the scene. My storyboard was also updated to take the changes to the scene into account.

Fig.1: A still from the updated Scene 4; though it is hard to tell from just a screenshot, the Defender is currently swiping sideways at the Y-Wing.

Next, I will create Scene 6. Like Scene 3, this is a six-second static shot, and one of the most pivotal scenes in the animation. It depicts the Y-Wing approaching the rock formation and swerving to avoid it at the last minute, while the TIE fighters both slam into it. I am unsure of what exactly will happen once they collide with the rock; an explosion effect would be desirable but I am unsure of how to create this within Maya, so it is possible that the ships will merely bounce off.

One problem I found while setting up the scene was that the lighting angle I had used for the rest of the animation caused the rock face to be almost completely in shadow, meaning it would be hard for me - and the audience - to tell where it was. I rotated the angle of the lighting by 60 degrees and the rock face is not properly illuminated; of course, this will require the audience to suspend their disbelief.

Fig,2: A close-up of Scene 6; compare it to stills from Scene 5 and you will see how the rock face is better illuminated.

As with Scene 3, setting up the animation itself is tricky and may require some trial-and-error. I will use a curve to animate the Y-Wing's movement, using the orthographic views to help draw it. I do not want the animation to last for the duration of the scene - once the Y-Wing disappears from view there is no point in animating it any further - but attaching an object to the motion path automatically sets the movement to last for the duration of the scene with no way to change it. To counter this, I temporarily set the scene duration to the number of frames I wanted the animation to last for - in this case, 100 - then changed it back to the actual duration of the scene (180 frames) once the motion path had been created.

Fig.3: The Y-Wing's motion path. One can see that it ends at frame 100. The other ships have not been properly positioned yet.

The other two ships have much simpler movement, and so do not require motion paths. The Defender slams head-on into the rock face, whereas the Phantom turns to try and avoid it but clips an outcrop and spins away. I thought about how to implement an explosion effect when the Defender hits the rock face; it was suggested that I do it in After Effects, so tomorrow I will attempt that during the lab sessions. For now, I will simply animate the ship up until the point where it hits the rock face.

Fig.4: A still from Scene 6: the Phantom (highlighted) has clipped the rock face and is spinning out of shot, while the Defender is tucked into a nook having slammed into the rock

As Scene 6 ended up taking up less time than I originally planned, I have shortened it from 6 seconds down to 4 seconds by cropping out the first 15 and last 45 frames, during which there was no on-screen action. To compensate for this, Scene 7 will crossfade into a credits screen. My storyboard will be edited to take these and other changes into account (the final storyboard will be linked to within my final blog post).

Now I have only Scene 7 left to create. Like the first two scenes, this is a very simple scene that depicts the Y-Wing, having escaped its pursuers, flying off into the distance; this will then crossfade into a credits screen.

Fig.5: A still from Scene 7.

All seven of my scenes have now been finished and rendered. All that remains is to add the finishing touches, then string them together in Windows Movie Maker and publish the finished animation.

Week 11 Pt.2 - Solutions to my Problems

As documented in earlier posts, I suffered from problems with getting the Y-Wing in Scene 3 to bank. While there is a "Bank" setting for motion paths, which causes the object to bank automatically as it travels, this proved to be unsatisfactory and ultimately I resorted to blending instead. The ship's rotation and the rotation of the curve were blended together; this meant I had to set keyframes for the ship's Y-axis rotation at various points of the animation, so that the ship's rotation matched the rotation of the curve and it would turn properly. I then set additional keyframes for the X-axis rotation so that the ship appears to bank while it turns.

Fig.1: The attributes of the rotation blend near the middle of the turn; note that the two Y-axis rotation values are similar but not identical, and that the ship will in fact only bank 18 degrees due to the animation blend.

Fig.2: A shot of a similar frame near the middle of the turn, with the banking clearly visible.

The next step is to animate the TIE fighters so that they follow the Y-Wing. This could be done using constraints, to make them follow the Y-Wing's movement, but I fear that these might not look realistic enough. Instead, I will use the same technique I used for the Y-Wing; have them each follow a motion path, and then blend their rotations so that they bank.

Drawing these motion paths was a tricky business, as not only did the TIE fighters have to realistically react to the Y-Wing's movement, they also had to travel a roughly similar distance to it in order to move at a similar speed; I also had to avoid having the ships collide with each other as they turned. Juggling all of these requirements proved tricky, but eventually I succeeded in drawing the motion paths.

Fig.3: A screenshot taken at a similar point to Fig.2, showing the TIE fighters pursuing the Y-Wing mid-U-turn. Note that I have not applied the banking yet.

After this, I chose to render the five scenes I have now completed, comprising 21 of the 30 seconds of my animation. By rendering them now, it will save me time later than I can use to finish the remaining scenes; it will also let me see how my animation looks so far. The issue with shadows not rendering properly turned out to be my render settings: to get the shadows to appear, I used the Maya Software renderer and turned on Raytracing in the Render Settings.

Rendering these finished scenes allowed me to identify some errors which I was able to correct. For example, in Scene 4 the terrain did not cover the entire scene and so there was a black triangle visible in the top-left corner; the terrain was enlarged to fix this. In Scene 5, the seam of the skydome texture was visible to the left of the screen; the skydome was rotated 20 degrees and the seam was hidden.

I have made a lot of progress this week, but I am by no means done yet, as I still have two more scenes to complete. Scenes 3 and 4 also need editing; Scene 3 to add in the banking of the TIE fighters, and Scene 4 to correct the positions of the TIE fighters to match their positions at the end of Scene 3. These should be simple enough to do, and then it will be a matter of merely importing my rendered scenes into a movie-editing program and stitching them together to create the final animation.

Week 11 - Problems and the Next Scenes

As described in my previous post, I have run into problems regarding the animation in Scene 3; namely, I cannot figure out how to get the ship to execute a banked turn. I have decided to leave Scene 3 for the time being and consult my tutor on how to do the scene during tomorrow's practical.

Furthermore, I then attempted to render Scene 1, partially to try and figure out the ideal rendering settings, partially to get it out of the way so I am not panicking about rendering times towards the end of the project. The scene rendered relatively quickly on my laptop, however the shadows are noticeably poor, even in "Production quality", Maya's highest quality settings (see Fig.1). Again, I will consult my tutor as to why this is the case - perhaps there is a setting I can change to fix the shadows - and if needs be, I will simply render the scenes using the university computers.

Fig.1: A still taken from my computer's rendering of Scene 1, as viewed in Windows Media Player, showing the terrible shadow quality

Due to these difficulties, I have decided to move on for the time being and do the next scenes. Scene 4 is another aerial shot similar to Scene 1, but zoomed out and from a different angle; it is thus much easier to animate. Like Scene 1, the skydome is not visible and is thus not needed.

Fig.2: The first frame of Scene 4, as it looks in Maya

The next scene, Scene 5, is an on-board shot from the Y-Wing as it approaches a large rock formation. To achieve this "on-board" look, I used the Align tool to move the camera so it was in line with the Y-Wing's nose cone, before having to move it forwards so it actually poked out of the front of the ship.

Fig.3: A close-up of Scene 5 after the camera has been aligned with the nose cone...

Fig.4: ...and what the camera initially saw once it had been aligned, until I moved it forwards

Due to the set-up of the scene, the TIE Fighters will not be visible and are thus not needed; however, I will need to model the rock formation itself. Since it will also be visible in Scene 6, it would be better to create it in a separate scene and import it into both. The rock formation will be made simply from a cuboid that I will sub-divide into several sections before manipulating and smoothing its edges and vertices to produce a craggy look.

Fig.5: The giant rock as it looks in its own Maya scene

Fig.6: The scene as it looks with the untextured rock added. Note that its scale may be changed in the final scene.

I used the same texture for the rock as I did for the ground, and the same shader type as well (Lambert), but I used a different material with lower tessellation (as it is much smaller than the ground). As with the TIE Fighters, the lighting angle means that the front of the rock is in shadow, giving it a menacing effect.

Fig.7: A close-up of the rock within the scene, showing the texturing and the shadow on the front face (note its proximity to the edge of the skydome)

With this in place, all that is left to do is to animate the ground and the rock, to make it seem as though the ship is rapidly approaching it. This is easily done, and so will not be documented. Hopefully, i will soon be able to go back and complete Scene 3.

Week 10 - More Complex Animation

This week O have learned a few advanced techniques for animating. These are constraints and Set Driven Keys, both of which allow one object's movement to affect another object in some way (such as causing the other object to follow it, or to rotate as it moves by). These techniques will come in handy for the third scene of my animation.

The third scene is a six-second-long static long shot, showing the Y-Wing performing a sudden U-turn to try and shake off its pursuers only for the TIE fighters to follow it. This will require significantly more advanced techniques than my previous scenes; the most obvious example is that simply moving the terrain beneath the ships will not work this time, so I will have to move the ships themselves. Additionally, while my previous scenes omitted some objects that were not necessary (the first scene had no skydome and the second had no Y-Wing), I will not be able to do this with the third scene.

As with the other scenes, the first step is to set it up. After some investigating, I discovered that the reason the skydome was shadowed was because I had applied a Blinn shader to it instead of a surface shader; for this scene I set the skydome shader to a surface shader and it was now properly illuminated before I even added the light source.

Fig.1: A zoomed-out view of my scene without the light source, showing how the surface shader causes the sky to be illuminated at all times

Fig.2: A slightly zoomed-in view of the completed scene set-up, showing the Y-Wing and TIE fighters in position

The easiest way to animate the Y-Wing's movement will be to create a bezier curve and get it to follow it. This will be easiest to do in the top camera view. Getting the TIE fighters to follow is a little trickier, but I will focus on that later.

Fig.3: The bezier curve that the Y-Wing will follow. Though it cannot be seen here, I have raised the line to be at the same height as the Y-Wing.

By going to Animate - Motion Paths - Attach to Motion Path, the ship now travels along the curve. I want to make it bank inwards as it turns, so the animation looks more natural, but I cannot currently figure out how to do this as keyframes do not appear to be compatible with motion paths. I shall explore this later.

Week 9 - Beginning the Animation

It is time to start my animation. To make it easier to animate, each shot will be a different scene; the rendered scenes will then be stitched together using Windows Movie Maker or a similar program to produce my finished 30-second animation. Because of this approach, the skydome is in fact unnecessary for my first scene: since it is a continuous aerial shot, the skydome will not be visible.

This first shot focuses on the Y-Wing at first, before panning left to show the TIE fighters pursuing it. To make this easier to animate, I will use a clever trick: instead of moving the ships forwards and having the camera track them, I will simply move the floor beneath them, creating the illusion of movement. This also allows me to shrink down the terrain a bit. To make the scene a bit more exciting, the ships will move about slightly, simulating air resistance buffeting them about.

Fig.1: My edited scene, with the redundant skydome removed and the terrain narrowed. It now resembles a runway.

First, I select the floor and create a keyframe on the first frame using the S key. I then go to the last frame, move the floor, and create a second keyframe. Maya automatically creates a "tween" connecting the two frames, so that the floor will move continuously on a frame-by-frame basis.

The problem with this automatic tween is that it is smoothed - the floor starts out moving slowly, then gradually accelerates until the halfway point of the tween, at which point it starts to slow down and then stops. Fig.2, taken from Maya's Graph Editor, clearly shows this gradual acceleration and deceleration.

Fig.2: The movement of the terrain as it looks in Maya's graph editor. 

I want the movement of the terrain to be linear, so this will not do. Fortunately, the Graph Editor, as the name implies, allows me to edit the animation graphs in real-time and thus fine-tune my animations. To change the animation tween from smoothed to linear, I simply highlight the line and click the "Linear tangents" button.

Fig.3: The animation graph after setting the tangents to linear.

I can also manipulate individual keyframes, allowing me to (for example) increase the distance that the terrain moves for the five-second duration of the animation, thus increasing the speed. The faster it moves, the faster it will look like the ships are moving, raising the tension of the scene.

The remainder of the scene is very easy: simply animate the camera to whip back and focus on the TIE fighters, then animate the three ships to move about slightly throughout the scene, thus making it look like they are being buffeted by drag and such, thus adding to the realism of the scene. This first, 5-second segment of my animation is now complete, with very little effort involved.

The next scene is a four-second shot from the rear of the Y-Wing, looking back at the pursuing TIE fighters. Again, this is simple to do, and can be achieved by keeping the models static and simply scrolling the terrain; however, this time a skydome is necessary as the horizon will be visible. While creating the skydome, I ran into a problem where the sky was not properly illuminated by my light source and appeared dark. I could not change the light source as I needed to keep the lighting consistent across each scene, so instead I changed the ambient color of the skydome texture from black to white, thus illuminating it.

Fig.4: The second scene with the un-illuminated skydome. Note that the aspect ratio of the scene will be 4:3 in the final animation, not 16:9 as shown here.

Fig.5: The scene with the skydome now illuminated. Note also how the lighting angle causes the TIE fighters (especially the Phantom) to be partly in shadow, enhancing their menacing appearance.

Animating this scene is, like the first scene, quite easy. The terrain simply scrolls beneath the ships, which wobble about a bit to simulate air turbulence, and also gradually creep forward to make it seem as though they are gaining on the Y-Wing. The next scene, however, will not be as easy to animate.

Week 8 - Setting the Scene

For Week 8, I began work on my animation. The first step was importing my three models into Maya and attaching them to handles, allowing me to manipulate them easier. Here I ran into two problems. The first was that the chassis of the TIE Phantom, which I had shaped using the Boolean - Difference tool, would not move in tandem with the rest of the model; to fix this I deleted the history of all objects in the scene, meaning the chassis was now treated as a simple object rather than the product of a Boolean operation. This also reduced the file size of the scene.

The second problem was that the Y-Wing model had been built to a different scale to the TIE fighters and was thus much smaller than it should have been. This was fixed simply by scaling the Y-Wing to double the size.

Next, I created the skydome and the terrain. The skydome has "double-sided" turned off, allowing me to see inside it, and is textured on the interior rather than the exterior; this was accomplished by inverting the normals. The terrain is also textured, and significantly larger than the skydome, allowing me to scroll it to create the illusion of movement. The texture used for the terrain is freely available from www.yoyogames.com; the skydome texture was provided by the university.

Fig.1: The scene as it looks so far.

Presently the skydome is very small, and so the horizon curves very visibly, which will not do at all for long shots. I can not eliminate the curve, as of course the interior of the skydome is circular, but I can minimize it by simply expanding it (and then the terrain to match). When making the actual animation, I will have to be careful to keep the ships near the centre of the skydome, or the join between it and the terrain will become obvious.

Fig.2: The skydome and terrain have been expanded, and the textures scaled to match.

The next step in preparing the scene is to add lighting. This will take the form of a directional light, placed somewhat near the edge of the skydome to simulate an afternoon sun; as can be seen in Fig.4, this creates a stark effect where one half of the ships are strongly lit and the other half are strongly in shadow, adding to the drama of the scene and enhancing the sinister look of the TIE fighters. The skydome will not cast or receive shadows, so I do not need to worry about it interfering with the lighting.

Fig.3: The scene with the added directional light.

The ships do not appear to cast shadows at the moment; this may be because the directional light is too far away. I will investigate this further. For now, however, there is one last thing to do: add the camera. Having done that, the scene is now ready to begin animating.

Fig.4: The camera, shown in green, positioned above the Y-Wing, ready to film the first scene of my animation as described in the storyboard.

Week 7 - Improving My Storyboard

This week I have been taught about the twelve principles of animation, as well as the theory behind camera angles. Using this, I will look at how I could have improved my storyboard.

The fourth part of the storyboard is a 6-second static long shot as the Y-Wing performs a banked U-turn and the TIE fighters follow it. This shot is not very dramatic, and perhaps could be replaced with a closer shot that pans from the Y-Wing completing the manoeuvre to the TIE fighters beginning it.

Week 6 Pt.2 - Storyboard and Moodboard

As the final part of this first assignment, I had to produce a 30-second storyboard for the animation that I will have to produce in my next assignment, as well as a moodboard (essentially, a collage of all my reference images). 

To preserve their size and quality, the moodboard and storyboard have been posted elsewhere and linked to below, rather than being inserted directly into this blog post.

Storyboard: http://i.imgur.com/OJpQVLk.png
Moodboard: http://www.gomoodboard.com/boards/3DnjgWnN/share

Week 6 - Texturing the Models

It is time for the final step: texturing the models. I will start with the TIE Phantom. As seen in Fig.1, I have added several new details to the Phantom, as well as some basic Blinn shaders to set its colour scheme. in some cases (such as the cylinders in the wing mounts) I deleted some unnecessary polygons to save geometry.

Fig.1: The TIE Phantom with additional details and basic shaders

More advanced textures are added by applying individual shaders to each object to which I want to apply a texture. To make sure the texture is mapped properly to the object, I use the UV Texture Editor to edit the object's UVs (the vertices that the texture is wrapped around). Fig.2 shows the UV texture map for the main cockpit body (the front of the cockpit has already been mapped).

Fig.2: The UV texture map for the main cockpit, to which its texture will be applied. Note that only the sides are included in the UV map: the front and back (which are not visible) are not part of the map.

The textures themselves, due to my limited skills in Photoshop, are simply created using PowerPoint, with the reference images as a rough guide. Fig.3 shows the texture for the main cockpit (may be subject to change in the final model).

Fig.3

When I apply this texture to the model, what I get is this:

Fig.4: The model immediately after having the cockpit texture applied.

To fix this, I had to open the place2dTexture panel and manually edit the attributes of the shape until I had the desired appearance (as can be seen in Fig.5). I was also forced to rotate the shape itself to align the cockpit texture properly. I could have used the UV Texture Editor to accomplish this, but in all honesty, I forgot it even existed.

Fig.5: The cockpit once the texture has been repositioned.

The TIE Phantom model is now complete. The next model to be textured is the Y-Wing. This is a slightly more tricky model as there are several complex details that need to be added, but eventually, through use of planar mapping, I managed to get that done as well.

Fig.6: The fully-textured Y-Wing.

The TIE Defender is all that is left. However, this only requires two textures. One is the windscreen, for which I can simply use an altered version of the windscreen texture from the TIE Phantom.

Fig.7: The windscreen of the TIE Defender, an altered form of the TIE Phantom's windscreen.

Fig.8: The TIE Defender with the windscreen textured on

The second texture is applied to the base plate of the wing, to match the wings themselves. This texture was taken from the TIE Defender blueprints that I used as reference images, and can be found here: http://unusualsuspex.deviantart.com/art/TIE-D-Defender-ortho-415211443

Fig.9: The finished TIE Defender with textures added to the base plates

All three models are now more or less finished and textured. The final step will be to prepare my moodboard and storyboard, before making my final submission.

Week 5 Pt.2 - TIE Defender

For my third and final model, I decided to create a TIE Defender. While I have already created a TIE model - the Phantom - the Defender is different enough visually that it is suitable as my third model. It also provides a handy narrative idea for the 30-second animation I must produce later on, as the Y-Wing I finished earlier in the week could be being pursued by the two TIE fighters.

As with the other two models I have made so far, the Defender's basic chassis is fairly easy to model. The cockpit consists of a single sphere, with a large triangular section at the rear to which its three wings are attached.

Fig.1: The basic chassis of the TIE Defender. The sphere is angled at 90 degrees to make texturing the windscreen easier.

On the end of each tip of the triangle is a wing mount. This consists of a cylinder that gets dramatically wider at the end, where it attaches to the wings. To save polygons, this will be made from a single cylinder, divided into two sections.

Fig.2: The chassis with the wing mounts added.

The next step is to assemble the Defender's three wings. These are rather more complex than the Phantom's. The first step is the base plate, which attaches to the wing mounts. On top of this is a small domed structure; this is drawn directly on by making the base plate a live surface.

Fig.3: The base plate with added hatch

As with the TIE Phantom, the main part of the wing can be produced from a single thin cuboid, however unlike the Phantom, each wing has two, attached to either side of the baseplate at an angle. After working out the angle with trigonometry (I won't go into that here), I crafted the wing, added additional details, then duplicated it onto the other side of the base plate.

Fig.4: The completed wing with extra details. You will notice that unlike my other untextured models, here I have textured the wing interior for clarity purposes.

Fig,5: The finished wing assembly, with a wing either side of the wing mount

Having finished the wing, I can now duplicate it and mount it onto each of the wing mounts.

Fig.6: The ship, complete with mounted wings

The ship is not quite finished yet. Attached to the rear is a hollow cylindrical object that houses the engine. This will be constructed from a single pipe object, split vertically into two sections.

Fig.7: The engine element

Fig.8: The ship from the rear, with the engine element added

All three of my ships are now essentially complete. I will spend the last week of the assignment texturing them and adding various miscellaneous details, because storyboarding the 30-second animation that will feature them.

Week 5 - Continuing the Y-Wing

With the deadline approaching, I must continue work on my Y-Wing model and start the third model. The basic shape of the Y-Wing is done , but there are a number of details that need adding. The first is the turbine/exhaust at the back of each engine; these are made from a single cylinder, tapered at one end.

Fig.1: The turbines at the rear of the engines

Continuing with the engines, I add the four rods that connect the disc vectrals and steering plates to each turbine. First of all, I created two cuboids and positioned them within the engines so that small portions of them stuck out in an X-shape. These allowed me to accurately position the actual trailing rods, using the align tool; the X-shape guides were then deleted.

Fig.2: The X-shaped guides within the turbines

Fig.3: The actual connecting rods, having been positioned (the X-shaped guides have now been deleted)

The disc vectral is made of a thin polygon pipe. Both it and the steering plates inside it have been tapered to be narrower at the rear.

Fig.4: The assembly at the rear of the ship's engines (there is an identical one on the other engine but only one is shown here so that the details are visible).

Next is the cockpit. The upper canopy must be added, as well as an assembly at the bottom that helps connect the cockpit to the main body of the ship. As with the lower part of the cockpit, the upper canopy will be crafted from a single block, but split into four parts rather than six.

Fig.5: The top of the upper canopy, having been sculpted into shape; the top still needs to be made narrower than the bottom, however. The blue cuboid in the lower-left is a guide block, used to help re-size the subdivisions.

Fig.6: The side view of the upper canopy, having been sculpted into shape. The bottom contours should join up with the upper contours of the main cockpit.

Fig.7: The completed upper canopy of the cockpit, having been narrowed down at the top and moved into position.

Fig.8: The assembly under the cockpit, connecting it to the main body of the ship.

There are also some extra details to be added to the main body of the ship. Finally, there is a turret-mounted laser cannon on top of the cockpit canopy, and two separate laser cannons on the front.

Fig.9: The additional details added to the main chassis

Fig.10: The laser turret mounted to the top of the cockpit

Fig.11: The laser cannons mounted to the front of the cockpit

The Y-Wing, like the TIE Phantom, is now essentially finished. It still needs to be textured, and there are perhaps other small details that can be added to it, but it is good enough for now. I will now set about choosing and modelling my third and final ship, before producing my moodboard and storyboard.