The Engine

Description: There will be four engines in total (all of them identical so I'll model one and copy it for the other three) and will be situated one in each wing. The back of the engine is where the thrusters are also located.

X-wing elements: It will include the engine on itself, the thrusters, the pipe & tabs the engine has inside and the platform where the engine is attached for then being attached to the wings.

Primitive used: Cylinder with the CHAMFER tool applied to it & Box for the attachment to the wing.

I decided to model the engine in the same file where the body is so I can get a good idea of the amount of polygons I am using.

First I created a cylinder and used the CHAMFER tool in the front edges to give the edges a round shape and then I used the BOOLEAN tool to make the engine hollow using another cylinder and making this second cylinder the operand B.

Now that I have the hollow engine I will scale down the interior back polygon of the engine and extrude it so I get the thing pipe that runs along inside the engine and from where the tabs will come up. Using the extrude tool and scaling the Vertices I achieve the arrowhead end of the pipe. I also extruded some of the top polygons from the engine's top part of the fuselage.

Now I am going to make the thrusters. Instead of using a new cylinder, I will model them from the engine's cylinder. I will go to the back view of the engine and I will extrude the back polygon just 2 units. Then I am going to scale down the resulting polygon and I will move its vertices to set the starting point of the thrusters. Then I am going to extrude it and there we have it!

Another option would have been to use the CIRCLE SHAPE in the back polygon of the engine and bringing it to 3D. But I like it more the way I did it so there is a kind of joint linking together the engine and the thrusters. Furthermore, using the CONECT EDGES tool I will be adding some details to the fuselage of the thrusters. Is great what is possible to do connecting edges and extruding polygons. Finally I used the BOLEAN tool again to make the thrusters hollow.

Now let's sort out the engine attachment to the wing. I will copy the engine to use it as Operand B with the BOOLEAN tool with the box.

Now I am going to extrude one of its side polygons and manipulate its vertex and edges to achieve the shape of a trapezoid. Once I have the trapezoid I will add the details of the fuselage, as usual, adding edges and extruding polygons.

Finally I will place the engine on the attachment and the attachment onto the wing. Because I have not been working on materials yet, I am not going to group the objects as one. Instead I am going to leave them as separate objects so I can move to apply materials on them. Once I have the materials I will group the whole X-Wing together to make it easier to move for the animation. Maybe I leave some pieces out of the group in case I want to make the X-wing explode and loose some components! These are the objects I modelled so far. They obviously need to be scaled until achieve the proper size.