x-wing drawings?
- Thread starter vistaVision
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Colin Droidmilk
Sr Member
Fantastic, thanks. Actually I'm quite thrilled with this, as I'd extrapolated 27mm from the famous top shot of Red 3 before asking Robiwon if the V2 - which always looked right on this dim - was 27mm. He said it was, so I began to feel justified in shouting my mouth off about it. The thing is, those extra mm get added on to the thickness of the fuselage at the canopy area, making the fuselage top view appear as a fatter-based 'triangle' than the narrower-based 'triangle' of Red 3.
Colin Droidmilk
Sr Member
I concur! (I suck at all 3d software - having had no experience with it)
Good luck, Flintlock, we're rooting for ya...
Colin Droidmilk
Sr Member
Well I don't own one, so my impressions are sort of secondhand. On the whole it looks pretty good, but I quibble even more about the nose on that one. And I think, despite the flaw I mentioned above, the V3 canopy is still far more authoritative-looking than EFX, which suffers from not being cast into the fuselage like ILM and like the V3. But it's got great-looking wings.
Also it's idealised, with all parallels orthogonal and straight and perfect. What I love about the Salzo kit is its handmade feel, with chips not cut straight, slightly unparallel guns etc. - the same kind of slight wonkiness clearly to be seen on the ILM originals. Working on the kit gives you a real sense of following in the steps of the ILM modelmakers, so to speak, which is a total blast.
Hope you guys don't mind me chiming in here with a few observations that i hope make sense. Minaturizer Ray's measurement of just about 27.4mm is almost exact to the pyro casting that I have here, which is an earlier casting than some of the ebay ones and, from what i understand, what Moe at least partially based the fuselage off of (though i should not speak for him).
As i have been looking more and more at this part of the fuselage/canopy as it has come up in a couple of threads, I see a couple of things that likely got the V3 up to the 30mm that it is. 1 is that it does have a harder edge both on the fuselage body and the canopy frame than the ILM casting has. Softened edges would make up a little space but not 2.6mm.
2nd is a bit harder to explain, but, at least to my eyes (which have been known to deceive me) the STB side of the fuselage directly in front of the canopy frame "sweeps in" a bit more towards the center of the body than the Port side does, again not enough to make up 2.6mm but the combo of these 2 things may get closer to getting the V3 to 30mm. By seeing how Moe constructed the V3 fuselage, the act of cutting the body out of straight pieces of Renshape may have "corrected" some of the asymmetry of the fuselage and made this area slightly bigger.
I know that when I made the size corrected version of the BSG TOS viper i had to contend with some of this stuff, most noteably the back plate. The engines on the original filming model pointed inwards towards the back ever so slighly. When i built the new master i straightend out the engines and the back plate became larger, ever so slightly, not a big deal until i tried to get the greeblies to fit in just like the original. There ended up being too much room.
I have a scrap casting here of the V3 that i may play with a bit by rounding this area to see how much closer it can get to the 27.4mm.
mike
As i have been looking more and more at this part of the fuselage/canopy as it has come up in a couple of threads, I see a couple of things that likely got the V3 up to the 30mm that it is. 1 is that it does have a harder edge both on the fuselage body and the canopy frame than the ILM casting has. Softened edges would make up a little space but not 2.6mm.
2nd is a bit harder to explain, but, at least to my eyes (which have been known to deceive me) the STB side of the fuselage directly in front of the canopy frame "sweeps in" a bit more towards the center of the body than the Port side does, again not enough to make up 2.6mm but the combo of these 2 things may get closer to getting the V3 to 30mm. By seeing how Moe constructed the V3 fuselage, the act of cutting the body out of straight pieces of Renshape may have "corrected" some of the asymmetry of the fuselage and made this area slightly bigger.
I know that when I made the size corrected version of the BSG TOS viper i had to contend with some of this stuff, most noteably the back plate. The engines on the original filming model pointed inwards towards the back ever so slighly. When i built the new master i straightend out the engines and the back plate became larger, ever so slightly, not a big deal until i tried to get the greeblies to fit in just like the original. There ended up being too much room.
I have a scrap casting here of the V3 that i may play with a bit by rounding this area to see how much closer it can get to the 27.4mm.
mike
Colin Droidmilk
Sr Member
Thanks, Mike! It's amazing to have you come in here and look at this issue. And the ideas you put forward are fascinating... any 'playing around' you do with that scrap casting will be eagerly watched for by all, I'm sure!
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So i had a few minutes to play, softening up the hard edges of the transitional part of the fuselage/canopy on a v3 casting got me to 28mm pretty easily. Not sure how clear it is in this pic but it does make it closer to at least this pyro casting. It's a subtle difference but it does make a difference. However i am not sure how this area is on other x wings, only this pyro casting....just some food for thought...
Colin Droidmilk
Sr Member
Quick work! How does that look in a 3/4 portrait shot? (That's the angle where the flaw is really noticable, the far strut always appearing a bit far away) Would it be possible to take a shot from that angle? (like the pose in McQuarrie's concept painting or the publicity photo of Red 2 coming toward us over the Death Star)
I had discounted shaving into this area because on heroes it is a hard edge - and also as you eat into the canopy strut you take the strut out of the plane of the fuselage sidewall, and also extend the area of the sidewall, making it look too high from some angles, which would be very wrong. Anyway, that's what I think would happen, but I'd love to see a 3/4 view of what you did there - maybe it'd be possible after all...
I'll work on getting a pic of that angle later today, it was a bit of a back and forth to keep the frame from degrading so while it was a simple mod, it does take some playing around to restore the harder edge. It is a bit of smoke and mirrors as well as there seems to be a couple of forces acting on that canopy frame that can't be changed on the V3, at least easily....
Ray, I got all the files and it opens up fine in Max 2009. In some of the camera views, however, the bitmaps do not show up on the image plane. I'll need to figure out how to fix that, and get a feel for working this way... It's new to me, but I am always interested in learning new things. I may also need to get a memory upgrade for my machine.
I have some other images of another ship, and I wanted to know what information is necessary to correct distortion with PTLens, so that I can set that one up in Max as well... I'd be able to improve my CAD models for that one too.
I have some other images of another ship, and I wanted to know what information is necessary to correct distortion with PTLens, so that I can set that one up in Max as well... I'd be able to improve my CAD models for that one too.
Colin Droidmilk
Sr Member
Cheers, it's much appreciated! Looking again at your photo, I'm getting seriously tempted to try it... what exactly did you do? Just file it and sand it?
You may want to hold off on trying it until i do a little more messing, there is another thing i want to tinker with before posting up an alternate view...
Oh, forgot to ask - Mike, any tips on finding an early-gen pyro recast? I wouldn't mind one for the collection at all...
Sorry i don't........
Colin Droidmilk
Sr Member
Wilco! Standing by...
Ok, so after the adjustment i made in the pics above I took another look at some of the Red 3 pics and at the pyro castings canopy frame and I think that if you are going to make this adjustment the actual canopy frame rail can be thinned out a bit on the top as well, i think only on the order of about .5-.75mm. In the pics below you can see that the port side rail has been thinned down a bit by scraping off a a bit from the side, making the top thinner, pardon the crudity of the clean up but i wanted to show the steps as much as i could. To me this seems to "pull" the canopy in a bit closer, getting it a bit closer to the 27.4mm that you guys are looking for. Again there is some smoke and mirrors going on with this and the changes are so subtle that many people may not be able to decect it. In fact it has taken me years to be able to detect small stuff like this myself, and i am still getting better at it all the time, often with the help of many of you guys here
mike
mike
Miniaturizer Ray
Well-Known Member
Rather than bore everybody with technical 3ds Max details, I sent you an email.
Miniaturizer Ray
Well-Known Member
I just had an idea. Mike, do you have a tape measure and a piece of paper? (that's kind of a rhetorical question
) If you tell me the height of the work surface, I can tell you where to position your camera to match the Red Three pictures for a direct comparison.
