John W. Vanderbeck

The landspeeder’s windscreen presented me with a major roadblock in the construction of this model.

In retrospect, a large portion of my problems came from strict adherance to the reference images. After many attempts at building the windscreen I found that my reference images didn’t all match up, so attempting to match my windscreen to them just wasn’t going to happen. In the end I used two of the reference images pretty closely and the other two just to compare form and style against. References more than blueprints.

The other problem that I had was having such a narrow view of my modeling techniques. I was so focused on polygonal modeling, that I didn’t see how much easier the windscreen would be to do using NURBS. After a post on the subdivision modeling.com forums, Proton mentioned how he would build it using spline patching in Lightwave. That may me approach the problem from the perspective of NURBS in Maya and shortly thereafter I was on a roll.

So just how was it constructed? The windscreen was built using curves and lofted surfaces. Let’s take a look at the process.

I started with my sideview to build the first profile curve. However, since my blueprints were only top and front views, I used a really low resolution frame capture from the Star Wars film as my first reference when building the curve. I used this reference just to get the shape of the curve to be somewhat accurate. I used Maya’s EP curve tool to draw the outline of the windscreen from top to bottom.

I then went into my top blueprint and moved it into the center of the windscreen horizontally and tweaked it a tad for length. I also used my front blueprint view to better match the profile to my blueprints rather than the reference images.

Next I duplicated the curve, and in my top view moved it over to the right of center about 1/4 of the way between the centerline and the right edge of the windscreen. I moved it back a bit to follow the contour of the windscreen and then in my side view I flattened the curve a bit. The reason for this is because as the windscreen goes from centerline to edge it gets shorter and shorter.I repeated this process three more times until I had one side of the windscreen done, and the last curve was flat on the chassis.

Next I grouped these curves, duplicated them, and flipped them over to cover the left side of the windscreen. For ease of management I then made all the curves into a single group and moved them to my base polys layer.

Next, I selected each curve in order from left to right and created a NURBS surface by lofting the curves. This created the windscreen itself and it looked great!

Now the observant among you probably noticed when I laid out my profile curves that they did not go out all the way to the edge of the windscreen area. You are 100% correct. This was an error on my part, so I had to fix the resulting surface’s width.

Since this is a SubD project I had one step left to complete. I moved the NURBS windscreen over to the base poly layer and then converted it into a subD surface. At this point it was near perfect, and there was just a teany bit of tweaking to do to finish it off looking great.

I hope you enjoyed reading this look into how I built the windscreen. I would love to hear your comments on the matter. Comments, critiques, and questions are always welcome as are suggestions and tips of your own on how this might have been done in a different manner.

Comment now and let’s hear what you have to say!