My Personal Project - X Wing from Star Wars

For my final project with Maya I built an X Wing from the Star Wars franchise. It took me about 8 hours total to make, but that was including researching images for references, doing a whole lot of minor details (Like R2's Paint job,and the engine fronts and things like that, and dealing with the computer I was using crashing 9 times. (It doesn't have a whole lot of ram and is like 5 years old, so Maya didn't play very nicely with it.) I did learn to save and save often as well!

Here are some snapshots of my progress as I went. (Obligatory finished product at the top)







this is my first ever original model. I am quite happy with the outcome, though it is apparent there are still some things that I can learn with this.

It was only a concept for me at first. I was having a really hard time deciding what to make, I was thinking about modeling an M1 Garand, But I didn't feel there was enough to that. Then making one of these popped into my head!


These orthographic side views were extremely helpful for me because I could see the proportions of everything and kind of line them up and see if I was doing pretty good. I didn't go exactly off of these images because they don't all agree with each other, but I used them as a reference and made my own spin on things.

These last few models were great! Especially the detail in the one below me. I didn't have the time to do that level of detail, but it was inspiring and gave me a really good idea of what I wanted to go for.








The humble beginnings...

Just a very basic wing and a thruster with an engine. The wings were made by taking two NURB curves and lofting them.










The gun for the X-Wing. Just a cylinder with one side scaled down, the curved thing in the middle was made the same way the wings were, and then I bridged the edges of the open gaps to make it a complete polygon since making it planar wouldn't work. (It's not a flat surface.)





Here you can see a wing is beginning to take shape, it has the thruster in the correct spot.









And now the wing is attached to the body! The gun and the engine are both children of the wing in the hierarchy so that it all moves together, for animation purposes.











It's really starting to take shape now. I was able to just duplicate the wings and rotate things around until each wing was oriented the way it was supposed to. You can also see that I have added the nose, a canopy, and a rough shape for the beginning of the nose-tip.






And here the nose is now the correct shape. I accomplished this by taking a cylinder and laying it across the back section of the nose. I then scaled the cylinder horizontally so that it would stretch out and make that nice soft curved shape. Then I cut the original object for the nose-tip using the cylinder shape I had made. That was made possible by a Maya Boolean tool that allows you to find the difference in the two shapes and get rid of it.




In this one you can see that I have started to add the detail into things. There are fronts on the engines now, which make them look a lot more realistic and accurate to the movie models, and the engines and guns are actually mounted to the wings now, instead of just floating above them.

In this image, you can (kind of) see that I added some detail to the back. So instead of it just being flat, It actually has a shape that resembles what the back of the X-Wing looks like, with some parts raised.



Here is the completed model! At this point, I wont be making any more changes to the shape of the model, for the most part, and now I will go about "painting" it with my materials.




And this is the final model! painted and everything! (This is an un-rendered version, I just took this using the windows snipping tool.) I did make a few changes to the shape, if you look closely you can see that I added some detail to the thrusters. I used the sculpting tool to give them a more blocky and beaten up kind of look so that they weren't just plain ol' cylinders. Also, the guns now have materials, and the glass is semi-transparent on the canopy.

I hope that y'all have enjoyed this! I am glad I got to share this with y'all! Thanks for reading!