03/19/2021 – Spent today merging the skeletal structure developed yesterday into the main body geometry while also merging the cowl into the weapons bay and refining a number of minor flaws with the shape. This should result in a good balance between how much UV mapping real estate will be consumed by all these details and how many verts it will all take up. A happy accident was that just as planned long ago, the gunpod could be swapped out for a single Sunflare heavy missile as below:
The original plan was that the belly gunpod bay would come completely off and the missile would be rough mounted essentially directly to the roof of that internal bay I’d been modeling – hence why I’d spent so much time working on details for what was normally almost invisible in the standard configuration. However if (and only if!) the missile is loaded in after the bay is fully open, the gunpod cover can stay!
This required some re-engineering of the winglet that was mounted there. I had wanted to lengthen it anyways to heighten the connection between the Achilles and the Perseus, and it needed a few fixes anyways. After some experimentation, it was shifted to the tail due aft of the animated weapons bay door, right above the main fuel tank. The base was remodeled for added functionality, now it has a bracket gripping the pivot point from two sides and I’ve roughly modeled in (but not separated the geometry) so that there might be a barbette and turret for the belly fin to rotate and use its thruster appropriately. 
And with that geometry for the underside of the entire fighter is nearly complete. The final rough patch is the upper back above the main fuel tank! Here is a p3d with the fighter as it stands.
Categories