All models completed

Today I finalized my three Star Wars ships. Below are the screenshots of each model with a summary of the problems I ran into, overcoming these problems, the accuracy of my models and how I could have improved:

Z-95 Headhunter

T-65 X-Wing

Sith fighter

Z-95 Headhunter

The Z-95 Headhunter was the first model I created in Maya. Whilst I was mostly happy with this model, I had one issue which I was not able to overcome at the time which is that the main base of the model is not symmetrical. I realize now that I can overcome this issue by splitting the model in half and using the "Mirror Geometry" tool which I did with one other model.

Another issue I had which I did fix recently is that my laser cannons were all made of separate cylinders. I found that although this was an easy way of creating the laser cannon, it was not very efficient and need increase my poly-count more than it needed to. I fixed this issue by deleting my laser cannon and recreating them using one cylinder and extruding the faces. I reduced the cylinders sub divisions from 20 to 15 to also reduce the poly-count caused by the extruded faces.

I think that my Z-95 Headhunter is fairly accurate to the actual model. However a problem I had when designing the model is that there are different variations and representations on how the Z95 should look when researching for images on search engines such as Google. For example this image gives the impression that the ship has a wide base whilst this image gave the impression it was thinner. This made it difficult to create an accurate representation of how the Z-95 Headhunter should truly look.

The biggest improvement I could make to my Z-95 Headhunter is improving the textures. Whilst I did apply textures to the ship, they were simple metal textures I created using the pattern tool in Photoshop. Although I did use some colour in the textures, I did not recreate individual bits of details which are in the actual ship. This is due to my lack of skills in Photoshop.

X-Wing

The X-Wing was the second model I created in Maya. One problem which occurred when designing this model was the angles of the wings. Due to the way the wings are rotated in the actual X-Wing model, I found it difficult to get a symmetrical positioning of the wings on each side. I was not able to use the Mirror Geometry tool in this case. I did partially overcome this by using the method where I would put the scale in a negative value to flip the wing. Although this helped, some wings were still not rotated properly and it took some time messing around with the scale and rotation of the wing till I was able to accurately position the wing. This made it difficult to perfectly position the wings in precise positions and rotations.

I do believe my X-Wing is accurate however there are some issues with the positioning of the four engines and four wings which could definitely use some improvement, however I did find it difficult to position without objects going through each other. Tools such as the align tool were not helpful in this case.

The biggest improvement I could have made to my X-Wing is improving the textures. Again like I mentioned with my Z-95 Headhunter, my Photoshop skills are not great so I was not able to add too much detail to my X-Wing. I feel like bump mapping may have helped greatly in improving the accuracy of my X-Wing. Another improvement I could make is the positioning of the engines and wings, however difficulties as mentioned earlier made this harder to accomplish.

Sith Fighter

The Sith Fighter was the final model I made in Maya. Since this was my last ship made, I rarely ran into any issues since most of my mistakes and issues made were experienced in my first two models and therefore I was able to avoid these issues whilst creating this model. I do realize however that I have some issues with the accuracy of the model. Comparing to other images of the Sith fighter, the top half of the wing should be larger, however due to the shape of the ship, I was unable to fix this in time for submission. There are also some other minor shape details I could have added to the bends of the wings however due to time and efficiency in polygon count, I decided to leave these details out.

Another downside as mentioned in the previous two other models is that the textures could be improved greatly. Although I did assign a texture to almost all of the objects in the scene, the textures were not great quality and do much match the actual Sith fighter with great accuracy. With better skills in Photoshop, I may have been able to get better results.