As some of you may be aware I am teaching myself to 3d model with the excellent Modo by The Foundry. My first project was a Snowspeeder from The Empire Strikes Back but, due to an unfortunate hard drive wiping incident, I lost all my work files.
I then started working on an Imperial Shuttle and have made good progress, but as it has been several weeks since I touched this I have lost my flow. I do intend to return to it as the Lambda Class Shuttle is a personal favourite of all the Star Wars ships.
I am itching to get started on a new project and thought I would share the process from start to finish on steemit, so without further ado my next project will be...
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drum roll please
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The BTL-A4 Y-wing assault starfighter/bomber - Yes, I love Star Wars - so shoot me
Source
Step 1: Reference
The first thing to do is to gather as much reference material as possible. This is critical to getting it looking right as Star Wars fans WILL be able to tell at a glance how poor a job you have made. Luckily a quick image search in your search engine of choice will yield a plethora of material. Also vital is that you manage to get hold of orthographic blueprints, hopefully with 3 or 4 views of your subject. I was lucky to find this image with a top, a side, front and rear views. This will do nicely.
Source
I took it into Photoshop and chopped it up into the 4 different views and then imported those into Modo. This is done simply by dragging the relevant file into the correct viewport.
It's advisable to place your reference photos into a group (as seen in the top right) for two reasons: you can toggle the visibility for the entire set of images on or off quickly and you can make it so the contents of the folder are not selectable on screen by accident - once you have your reference pictures lined up and scaled properly you don't want to move them by mistake.
If you would like to keep up to date with my project then please follow me and upvote this post
