[Assignment Models] A-Wing: Part 1 - Creating the Main Body

The second assignment model that I decided to work on is the A-Wing. I originally considered this model to be the second hardest, after the Tie Interceptor, due to the curvature of the body and engine detailing. To begin I imported the schematics I will be working from. For this particular model I managed to find schematics for the top, front and side of the ship.

Once I had setup the scene by lining up the schematics I then moved on to creating the main body of the ship. First I created a simple cube object and scaled it to fit the length and width of the front half of the ship.

Next I made some cuts along the body using the multi-cut tool and began moving/scaling vertices to match the curvature of the ship from the top, front and side.

I decided to redo the very front of the ship using a freshly extruded face from the middle of this object as it had so many edges/vertices at the front it was started to become warped when scaled down to the size required by the schematic.

Next I started deleting some of the faces from the front of the ship in order to make the cutaway detail seen at the front of the A-Wing. Once these faces had been deleted I then started bridging edges together to fill the holes created by deleting these faces.

Next I had to align the vertices from this new cutaway detail to match the schematic in preparation for extruding a face.

In order to make the newly extruded face match the sloped detail found at the front of the A-Wing I made some cuts so I could use the geometry to target weld some vertices together.

After target welding these vertices together to make this sloped edge I started to make some minor adjustments to the vertices found at the front of the ship so it more closely matched the lines found in the schematic.

In order to keep shaping the front of the ship to match my reference images and schematics I started making cuts straight across the body to prepare faces to be inset into the model.

Preparing these faces for extrusion required me to delete many of the unnecessary edges that had been created from the lots of different cuts made when shaping the body. Below are pictures of the surface after these deleted, creating smooth faces.

The final part of preparing these faces for extrusion was to make sure the vertices line up from the front view so that the faces weren't angled weirdly when the extrusion is made.

After all the preparation this is the finished product with the newly created faces extruded inwards to inset them into the model.