The Guns!

Description: The gun will be the last part of the X-wing modelling. There will be a total of four, one in each ending of the wings.

X-Wing elements:  It will include the gun itself, the gun barrel and the attachment to the wing.

Primitive used: A cylinder.

The process for modelling the gun will be very similar to the process to model the engines. I will start creating a cylinder. What I now want is to make the cylinder half hollow and extrude the gun barrel from the back polygon. To make the cylinder hollow, instead of using the BOOLEAN tool like I did with the engine I am going to use only the EXTRUDE tool.

I am going to extrude the cylinder slightly and I am going to scale the vertices of the extruded polygon down. The result will be a "inner" radius for the cylinder. I will then select the inner radius and extrude it backwards until it is place half inside the gun.

Then I am going to do exactly the same but in the opposite direction to create the barrel of the gun and bring it out of the cannon. Before this step, I will also shape the main part of the gun since, as you can see in the example gun I took from the internet, the canon has different thicknesses and heights along the cylinder. For example, to create the ring I will use the extrude tool but I need to change it from GROUP EXTRUDING to LOCAL NORMAL EXTRUDING otherwise the extrude direction is not what I want.

After expending some time adding details to the gun and added the attachment to the wing it looks like this:

Let's go back to the gun barrel now. One of the first things I notice from X-wing Images is that lots of tabs are coming from the barrel of the gun, just like the engine but instead of three, all around it. So I am going to extrude every other polygon from the barrel of the gun until they reach the inner cylinder walls. Once I have the tabs done I will keep extruding the barrel. I will keep in mind that the barrel (the pipe only, not the points of the gun) is divided in three sub barrels with different heights.

Now I just need to make the tip of the barrel. To make the arc-shaped tip I will use the EDITABLE SPLINE approach. I will go to shapes and select an ellipse. I will draw the ellipse on the top view, I will convert it to a editable spline and then I will modify its vertices with the FILLET tool. I created 2 extra vertices and I am going to move them until I achieve the arc shape I need for the tip. Once I have done this, I need to outline the ellipse in order to be able to extrude it and bring the 2D shape into 3D.

Now I am going to use the BOOLEAN tool to remove the part of the ellipse I don't need for the arc. I will simply create a box primitive and place it covering all the areas from the ellipse I don't need. Then I will use the BOOLEAN tool on the ellipse and will select the box as OPERAND B.

Then I will place it in the tip of the gun barrel, scale it and finish the barrel.