Unwrapped Like a Gift.

The model is finished, well to a point but being a stickler for detail i have a funny feeling i might revisit the modelling stage later to add some obscure detail i missed or maybe just tweak a single vertex. The time has come to unwrap it, which turned out to be a mind melter, I was seeing grey and white checkers for several days after the first day of it.

Yet Some More Detail.

Time to add the fiddly bits to the aircraft, not much left to do but it still took a proportion of my time which in retrospect could have been spent more wisely. In my opinion hindsight isn't a wonderful thing merely something everyone should use to learn from and just maybe the world would be a better place if that was the case, fat chance. With only the wheels, exhaust, guns and antennae left i cracked on. I constructed the wheels from 3 basic cylinders. I started with the mount, which consisted of two of the cylinders. i bent the lower of the two and welded it to the other. Then with the third added a couple of cap segments and manouvred them to cause an indentation, giving rise to the wheel's shape and then attached this to the mount, and add a simply guard.

Intake all the Detail.

After i had found out less was more, like so many things these days, I was left to do some poly removal and tweaking on my overcomplicated box. After several hours of trials and errors, what i ended up with was a tidier model weighing in at just under 800 polys, that in my opinion looked better anyway.

Strap on a Pair.

So far the model seems to be going well, at least for a first time effort. I have the fuselage boxed out and its time to allow this bad boy to take flight, it needs a pair of wings. So only one wing need be modelled, as symmetry will do the honours of making life simple. Again a box was drawn up and edited in poly mode. Using mainly the scale gismo to shape out the initial shape and the move gismo to tweak a couple of vertices i ended up with a pretty decent looking wing shape.

Buckle Up Lets Fly.

So I had constructed my stage from which i could model off, now it is to the interesting part. With no more than a cuboid which at the time i had images of turning into a kellogs box and running rampant ...

Start Your Engines.

The assignment was to construct a low poly model of any World War II aircraft texutre it and provide a simple animation. So i have my first assignment, the door to the virtual world awaits and i want to make my first model worthy candidate. Not knowing all that much about the old crows of World War II I perused the web looking at different types from bombers to dogfighters, Mikoyan-i-Gurevich soviet styled attack planes to the Japanese kamikaze aircrafts i finally settled on the American Equivalent of the Spitfire, the P51 D mustang...

Day One on the Job

They say "drop 'em in the deep end and watch 'em swim" and quite rightly. Our first assignment has been pretty much like that, to model a World War II aircraft, unwrap and texture it and then provide it with a simple environemnt and produce a basic animation. The first week was pretty much a crash course in 3D Studio Max and its essential tools and gismos, and how they can be utilised to produce and manipulate various shapes..

Life Changing..

Ok so it all started with a change of heart. I got stuck in what some may call a bit of a rut, and needed a drastic lifestyle change. I eventually enrolled onto a computer games design course on no more than a whim and a love for playing computer games, for which i can honestly say i had never imagined myself pursuing a career in the games industry. And what a gut instinct it has proven, i had never appreciated what went on behind a game, weve been modelling our first assignment for no more than 5 weeks now and im loving every minute of it. It has changed my entire perspective on life, ordinary mundane objects are now endless possibilities for incoproration in games. When i was at college, i had conversations about how good it would be to go paintballing around my college, i think in the near future i may be able to bring that to life by creating a playable level for the unreal or source engine.