Taiidan Fighter Complete

10/13/2020: So after a little over one week of working at it I think the wise thing to do is call the fighter complete. Instead of screenshots, here is a p3d.in link that should allow you to view the fighter at your own discretion: https://p3d.in/NFFjG

In retrospective, there was a lot to learn throughout the project – at first it was getting used to smoothly transitioning my camera from perspective to the various x/y/z axis cameras at my own volition instead of following along with the tutorials. Then it was experimenting with instanced geometry. Maya knows how to render that properly, but p3d sure doesn’t so I had to Modify – Convert – Instance to Object and then shuffle geometry around a bit before exporting.

Instancing geometry was definitely exciting when it came to details like the gun clusters and the nozzles in the thruster block, but led to unusual behavior when attempting to mirror or duplicate objects. The last, and best looking, piece of the fighter that I worked on was the four big winglets with their rotating bases. Instead of selecting the grouped base + winglet within the outliner, I mirrored each piece of geometry separately and rebuilt the heirarchy in the outliner. Moving things along normals and adjusting fine details on the surface is definitely possible within Maya but instead of needing to painstakingly define each normal, there’s a lot of slide commands and options to constrain movement along faces. Starting with a more complicated hull plan and then evolving from there would have been wise as right now the fighter doesn’t have the beautiful arched back of the Taiidani scout.

In order to ensure that this sketch of a fighter was original, I purposefully avoided consulting any concept art from the original games and instead wanted to make something Taiidani from memory. This helped the fighter feel a bit more original. I think the gun cluster came out fantastically, as did the four large wings, and I love the midsection. This also meant that I wasn’t working off of any kind of sketch or reference and just doing pure geometry work. It’s come out as a sort of hybrid interceptor-scout right now, but I love the character the two little winglets on the fuselage add. Weak points are the cockpit and the fuselage.

There’s still probably two weeks of work left detailing the thing and then of course texturing but I’m going to declare this done for now and return to taking lecture notes. I think a week of tutorials and a week of homework projects should be a pretty good rhythm. See you round, and I’m going to go play some Homeworld.