WIP: Avatar Scorpion built in Maya

Started by Häri, April 27, 2010, 07:50:31 PM

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Häri

Hey everyone, when I first saw Avatar back in December I was blown over by the effects, as I'm sure most others were! So watching all the 'behind-the-scenes' videos on the interwebs, I caught a few seconds of a Scorpion gunship on some software which looked a lot like something I have on my computer. For those of you that don't know, Maya is a 3d modelling/animation package that is not free, and is quite expensive, but luckily for me I managed to get an insane student discount as I use it for my university course :D

Anyways, a few months back I started to build the Scorpion in Maya, mainly to challenge myself into trying techniques that my course wasn't teaching, and I did the basic wings and tail structure, however, I eventually stopped due to a lack of material to work with (the books didn't show enough detail and I couldn't remember the film vividly enough) so now I have it on DVD, I have decided to resurrect ye olde project and work on it when I have some free time. My main questions for you guys would be what would be the best shape to start off with when designing the main body of the thing? The beauty of Maya is that you can work with many of the vertices of an object to change its shape, but starting off with the correct object saves a lot of time and effort! Similarly, do you think any of the proportions are off? As I said earlier, my source material wasn't great and so i had to make a lot of guess work based on modern aircraft, which will undoubtedly mean some of you will have different ideas.

Pictures below of what I achieved a few months ago, and I'll update as I do more.

http://img24.imageshack.us/i/scorpion3u.png/

http://img341.imageshack.us/i/scorpion2.png/

http://img26.imageshack.us/i/scorpion1.png/

As I'm sure you guys can tell, its not yet textured and there are not many smooth edges, plus a few sacrifices I had to make in order to keep my sanity (I designed the missile pods different to how they are in the film in order to make them fit properly, and the missiles themselves are just made up in my head. I'm going to fix some of these problems when the rest of the thing is built, and I MAY add an animation in depending on how I go.

Please just bear in mind that I'm no god with this software, only had it a few months, and if anyone here had worked with it, please give me tips, I'm always eager to learn :D
Who needs these fancy Na'vi names when you can just write your normal one as a Na'vi would pronounce it? :D

Kätsyín te Zotxekay Tsyal’itan

Yea, looks good. One thing i noticed though. The smaller inner wings actually have two missiles on rails on them, not just one.
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