Week 2 - Start of Assignment

This week I began work on my assignment. I must create three spaceship models, based on Star Wars craft, and then storyboard and animate a 30-second animation featuring them. The first six weeks will be focused on creating the models and storyboard, and during the following six weeks I will produce the animation itself.

The first spaceship model I have decided to create is the TIE Phantom, as it appears to be a simple enough model to create. Its basic main body can be created by intersecting two hexagonal prisms, one regular and one irregular, and its cockpit can be created using two truncated cones. It will, of course, require more detail than this, but the basics are easy enough.

I started by obtaining various reference images of the Phantom, including front, side and top views (see Fig.1). I sketched over these views in PowerPoint to help me gauge the scale of the basic objects that would comprise the model (see Fig.2).

Fig.1: The reference image I used to create the model...

Fig.2: ...and an annotated version of the image, showing how I can construct various sections using basic shapes.

Having drawn these basic guidelines, I was able to start work on the model itself. Fig.3 shows the basic chassis, constructed from a hexagonal prism (the light grey structure in the centre of the model in Fig.1) and a triangular prism (as seen in Fig.2).

Fig.3

Producing the irregular hexagonal prism was difficult, but I achieved it by constructing three smaller triangular prisms, aligning them with the corners using the Align tool, then using the Boolean - Difference tool to subtract them from the larger one. It could alternately be done by carefully stretching the vertices of a hexagonal prism.

Initially, my chosen method did not work perfectly, as an overlapping face would be left behind (see Fig.4) and proved impossible to remove. I solved this simply by moving the smaller prism a minute distance so that it completely overlapped and removed the offending face. The finished chassis base can be seen in Fig.5: you may also notice that I have translated the model upwards slightly so it no longer intersects with the grid, making it easier to see.

Fig.4: The face left behind after subtraction

Fig.5: The finished chassis base

Another difficulty worth noting is that copying and pasting an object within Maya will automatically place the pasted object within a new group. This makes it difficult to manage objects, and if you repeatedly copy-paste a single object you will end up with several groups-within-groups, which is inefficient and impractical. Instead, using Duplicate (shortcut Ctrl-D) will produce a perfect clone of the object, just like copy-pasting it, but without placing it in a new group, making it easier to manage one's objects.