Tutorial: Building a 3D Spaceship Model with Wings3D

[GaryChildress]

Extrude the face just a little ways until you get something like this, then, with the same face still selected, right click and choose "Scale Uniform".

[GaryChildress]

Scroll the mouse, increasing the scale of the face until your extrusion looks almost like a cone sticking out from the back of your ship. Then right click again and choose "Inset" again from the menu.

[GaryChildress]

Keep the same face selected, right click and choose "Move" from the menu and then "X" from the small menu that follows. This will move your face along the X axis. As you move the face inward it will dig out the cone to make it look more like the engine you want.

[GaryChildress]

You should now have something that looks like the following:

[GaryChildress]

Now that the basic capsule of our spaceship is done we want to make some wings for our ship. Obviously wings aren't going to do much good in space but they make our spaceship look cool. [8D]

First off Select "Deselect" again to make sure that none of our faces are selected.

Next, clicking the mousewheel, rotate around to the side of our spaceship as seen below. Click on one of the faces on the side toward the back of the ship as shown. Next rotate to the exact opposite side of the ship and choose the exact symetrical opposite face on the other side. Now, WITH BOTH FACES SELECTED simultaneously, right click and choose "Inset" again from the menu.

[GaryChildress]

Again, lets extrude our inset faces. By extruding them both at the same time, you easily ensure that both extrusions are identical. We want our wings to be symetrical. Choose "Normal" again from the menu which follows.

[GaryChildress]

Extrude the wings a little ways out, left click to end the extrusion process and then right click again and choose "Scale Uniform" once again.

[GaryChildress]

Scale the faces until you get something like this, then left click to deactivate the scaling process.

[GaryChildress]

Now switch to "edge selection mode" so that we can work with just the edges of our polygons instead of the faces.

[D.W.O.H]

i have never done anything like this before and i think with your help I may be able to do something

but even tho its not exactly the same as your i followed along nicely & if i done it right the pic of it should show

[GaryChildress]

Now we're going to make some windows on our spaceship for our astronaughts so they can see where they're going. Select the edges shown below by clicking on them with your mouse cursor.

[GaryChildress]

Right click and choose "Cut" from the menu, then "3" from the following menu. This will cut our line into 3 segments so that we can make some relatively small windows up front.

[GaryChildress]

Now switch to "Vertex Selection Mode" as shown below.

[GaryChildress]

Make sure each of the newly created dots ("Vertexes") on our line segment is selected, right click and choose "Connect" from the menu. This will create some new faces which we will use for our windows.

[GaryChildress]

Now switch back to "Face Selection Mode". Notice our two new small faces on the front of the ship. Deselect everything again and then click on each of the two small faces to select only them. Now right click to bring up the context menu and then right click again on "Material". It's very important to RIGHT click on the material selection. If you LEFT click it will bring up a list of existing materials you can use. By RIGHT clicking you are creating a NEW material.

[GaryChildress]

Let's name our new material "Windows" because this is going to be the material that shows for our windows.

[GaryChildress]

Click "OK" and we come to the "Material Properties" window. Click in the white box at the end of the slider bar next to "Diffuse" to bring up the color options for this material property.

[GaryChildress]

We want our windows to glow yellow from the lights inside the ship. So click somewhere on the yellow bar to create a yellow material color for our two faces.

[GaryChildress]

Next move the "shininess" bar almost all the way to the left so that our windows will glow very yellow/white.

[GaryChildress]

We want our spaceship to be fashionable so the last touch we'll add to our model is a little color to the wings. Deselect everything once again and then select the top side of the wings. You can select the bottom too if you want but the bottoms aren't going to show up in our later renders so there's really no need to add color to the bottom unless you plan on using your model in a 3D game someday.

With the wings selected choose "Inset" one last time to create a little color swath on the wing. Create the inset and then right click to choose the "Material" one last time. This time let's choose a green color for our wing highlights using the same color selection process as before.