03/22/2021 – Over the weekend I spent a little time working on some details on the rear of the fighter. This region had always been chunky and without much to indicate functionality, so I’ve added what will be two large vents, presumably for dumping waste heat in the form of coolant. They can be viewed below:
The next area I was drawn towards, somewhat in spite of my own better judgment, was the cockpit. For the majority of the project this has been a thick opaque canopy over an otherwise undetailed portion of the fuselage. I was struck by two opportunities. I want to eventually render a sequence in Maya using this fighter – having a modeled cockpit will be necessary. The other opportunity was matching the UI of Freespace to panels within the cockpit. You can see how that turned out below:
The detail that bothers me currently is the struts for the instrumentation panels. I wanted them to be as unobtrusive as possible while still connecting to the fuselage. One iteration I experimented with had the instrumentation panels attached to the canopy instead of the fuselage and that just seemed a bit bizarre, though I may return.
There’s huge opportunities for iterating on this space – it could be the project of many weeks adding in pedals and carefully sculpted ergonomic interiors, but this really only needs to be good enough, not perfect. Here’s a render from Maya’s raytracing of the current fighter:
The other major change today was removing the belly pylon entirely. Without it the fighter still has an intimidating and aggressive, solid profile but feels less haphazard. The above version of the ship can be viewed in 3d form here.