TIE Fighter - Making the model

Basic Shape

I started off the TIE Fighter by creating a sphere and moulding the basic shape by cutting out edges by selecting edges and deleting the edge and vertex, this gave me a hexagon shape that I wanted for the window and back. I then extruding them inwards, I started at the front, then made the back in the same way. I then split the model in half so I could work on one side and duplicate it to the other side later. For the start of the arms I used more extrusions and vertex manipulation.

 

The main problem with this was trying to make straight edges and manipulate the shape while still keeping the spherical shape of the body, in hindsight I could have used a separate object for the brace on the side but at the time it worked and didn't turn out bad in the end, i make come back to it and change it later.

The Connector/Brace

After the body I Started to create the connector that connects the wing with the cockpit, I did this in a similar way to the gun on my X-Wing, lots of extrusions. I also used the same technique of duplicating the cylinder selecting faces, inversing and extruding to make the brace between the connector and the wing. I found the Freeze Transform tool useful here as it allowed me to work on my model elsewhere and then perfectly align it back again by setting the transformation back to 0.

The Wing

The Next step was to make the wings, This was relativity simple and just required some extrusions and vertex manipulation. I will most likely come back to the centre part of the wing to add more detail with bump mapping when I add textures.

Connecting/Mirroring the object

Now that the basic shape is completed I decided to mirror the object to the other side by grouping the objects, changing the pivot point to the centre of the split and then changing the x scale to negative. I then had to combine each sides objects and merge the vertexes together. This meant that the shape was easier to manage and there were less vertices to worry about.

The Guns/Top of the body

For the guns I created a cube with some cylinders, shaped the vertexes and extruded the shape to look like the ones on my reference images from the moveboard. I then tried creating a top bit for my model by duplicating it, selecting the faces I needed and then inverting the selection and deleting the bottom half. This looked ok but it wasn't quite what I wanted so instead I decided to extrude the top face and got a nicer effect.

The Engine

I was going to do this in the same way as I did the X-Wing engine where I created an object, changed the pivot point to the centre then duplicated and rotated it around but instead I decided to extrude the engine inwards instead in a hexagon pattern as this is what it looked like in the reference images I have looked at.

Overview

Overall the model is very basic but that is because I wanted to add more detail when I come to texture it, I may add more detail to the wings and body later but for now I want to try and get a nice effect when texturing using bump mapping and other tools.