The Cockpit

Description: The Cockpit will be the main component of the TIE fighter.

TIE Fighter Elements: The cockpit will include the main "ball" where the pilot goes, the arms that connects the ball to the wings, the back thrusters and the front window, plus all the details from the fuselage.

Primitive used: one sphere, one cylinder, three tubes and eight rectangles splines.

The first thing I am going to do is create a sphere and reduce its segments to 32. With 32 segments the sphere still looks like a sphere but will have much less polygons. Then I am going to rotate the sphere 90 degrees in the X axis. I think that doing it this way it will be much easier to define the top and back side details of the cockpit as well as the cylindrical shaped "arms" of the cockpit.

I am going to give shape to the arms now. First of all I need to select the polygons that I am going to extrude to pull the arms from the cockpit. Then I am going to create a frame around the resultant cylinder extruding a bit some of the upper and lower polygons and moving them until they make contact with the arms.

Now that I have the beginning of the arms I will work on the rest of the arms. From now on I will work only in one side of the TIE Fighter and when I am done I will use the Boolean tool to split the sphere in two, copy the remaining side (which will be the final look of all the components of the TIE Fighter) and mirror it to place it beside the original side. Doing it this way I will be able to make the model in half the time.

Once I completed the arm with a proper length and shape, I will give it a some detail before I get started with the details of the sphere.

Right, using the Boolean tool I will remove half of the sphere. Then I am going to copy the cockpit and mirror it to place it side by side and obtain the whole thing.

Now I will finish off the cockpit adding the back thrusters, the top side details and the front window. for the thrusters and the front I am going to make them from other primitives and then I will just move them and place them on the cockpit. For the top I am actually going to work in the original sphere. I am finding quite tricky to work in round surfaces, as opposed to work in squared and straight surfaces.

For the thrusters I am going to use a tube primitive and I am going to scale down the top polygons to get the shape I want. When I create the tube I will give it 1 units for the height and will reduce the height segments to 1 to , once again, reduce the amount of unused and unnecessary polygons. I am going to scale the tube until it looks like it is part of the sphere. Now I am going to extrude the front polygons and scale them down to get the "cone" shape of the thrusters.

The last part will be the window in the front. First I am going to create two tubes primitives. One of them will be the circle outer radius and the other one will be the octagon inner radius. I will give them the same height. Now, to make the bars that connect them both I am going to use the rectangle spline. I am going to make 8 of this rectangles to pull them into 3d later.

Then I am going to place it in the front of the sphere and will modify it so it matches. I will group all the objects that form the window into a group called window so it is easier to move it around. This is the final result: