Well, it's been about three months since I began this latest update. Initially, I had intended to show you how we modeled a snowspeeder from conception to finished product - illustrated step by step.

That just ain't gonna happen. I don't have the time or the energy to model a new snowspeeder right now so instead I'll just display some images of different stages of the project.

We used the commercial solid plastic models as reference materials as well as photos and illustrations from some of the many Star Wars books available. And of course we referenced the movie, The Empire Strikes Back.

To the right are links to view some Lightwave screen shots that demonstrate how we break down an object into individual parts and build them in separate layers (the highlighted rectangles, top left of screen, indicate selected, active layers). This is especially useful for mechanical objects that have many moving parts in that a pivot point can be set for each part in its own layer as opposed to building an entire object in a single layer that contains only one pivot point.

 As you might have guessed from the opening page, we ran into our share of problems during the modeling stages. We began with a flat angled plane and, using photographs of a snowspeeder in the three viewports - top, back, and left - as reference, cut out the shape of the upper wing section.

From that point on we were in for "non planar nightmares". We used that wing to build upon to create half the main body - the beauty of the mirror tool is that you need only create a half of the whole, mirror it along a selected axis, and merge the points to join the two as one.

Unfortunately, snowspeeders tend to have a lot of nasty weird angles and when you move a single point of a plane out of whack (something we experienced often) to match an angle, the result is a non planar. Non planars are Lightwave gremlins that mess with your geometry and tend not to render properly. If you think of a rectangle as a plane connected by four points (like a sheet of paper) and one of those points is moved so that it is not aligned along the same plane as the other three (or more) points - that is your non planar.

cGreat googly moogliesaption

a plane subdivided into four joined planes with the center point raised above the imaginary plane that the other six points share That's four non planars you're looking at

Needless to say, there was quite a lot of cursing and hair-pulling (and I'm not saying whose hair) as the development of the speeder progressed. But we all (almost all) got through it and that's all that matters.

Eventually we got to the point where we could begin to paint our textures in Photoshop. There was again more cursing though not so nearly as inventive and as exuberant as during the modelling stages.

There were the few fortunates who had more than a little experience with Photoshop (you know who you are), alas, I was not included in that select group. The rat bastidges.

I must admit, I didn't paint as many textures as I would have liked but the process, although tedious, was fairly simple once I got the basics down. I ended up using a combination of painted texture maps, bump maps, transparency maps, and Lightwave procedural textures to save a little time. Procedurals are limited and random at best and there's a lot of tweaking involved to get the result you're looking for. I still plan on painting more maps for my demo reel footage when I recreate my snowspeeder / A.T.A.T scene.

a sample of some maps