Make Obi-Wan’s Jedi Starfighter

First gather reference material ... I took pictures of a toy ... watch the movie ... here are other images for inspiration ...

Insert vertex, connect, remove edges, constrain vertex moves to edges, etc.

this will be a hole

select top faces only and detach a clone

flip normals on that object

remove polies at the bottom

re-attach

this guy that is bevelled backwards now needs to come down

cap holes and connect vertices

delect these faces for the hole

shift drag down

weld

scale back rudders

Now is a good time to try an experiment, supposedly this works to minimize overly sharp angles in final renders ... select all polies and auto smooth to 10.00.

As time goes on we can chamfer edges to get an even better result.

Another option is to go http://www.ddag.org/ and download the plugin f-Edge for help smoothing edges. As this is a MAP type solution to the modeling problem, we will deal with it later on in our process.

Our cabin started as a cylinder and was shift dragged back on the outer edge loops ... this made the hull ... loops were scaled to fit the form ...

The hull or cabin is nothing but an extended primitive – oil tank --- with ffd and vertex soft select to push the shape around to match the template. Other objects like the base fuselage and the exhaust simply intersect it for now.

The inner cabin and the fuselage have to be cut carefully as booleans are not so dependable. These planar shapes will function as open faces that butt up and intersect the shell of the hull.

Torpedoes will be lofted ... with scale deformations ...

BTW if you don’t like lofting, there are other ways, for example, bevelling polies, and as for bends:

basic shapes at first ... everything detailed can wait ...

Exhausts are cylinders with 18 sides ...

changed pivot points to 000 ... from world transf coord center, rotating wings down 12 degrees ...

Make the flaps by cloning the recess for them in closed position, flip normals, create edge, cap:

meshsmooth

Make a spline to extrude to boolean away the roof on the cabin

convert back to edit poly and we now have separate elements we can use to detach to object, hinge, shell, etc.

If the shell modifier gives you any trouble, like crashing or slowing down, take it off, we can put it back on again later.

Let’s keep in mind we are after basic structure here. There is more to do on the bottom view. The guys need to be shorter:

We need to build out this bottom part that basically holds the hull/cabin together with the wing ... first we trace with a spline:

Zero out your centerline vertices on X

In World/Use transform coord center, mirror a copy:

Attach,  and weld the 2 center vertices together:

In Back view,

Extrude our man up ... he needs to rise ABOVE the exhausts ...

Scale top vertices:

The basic idea is to see this in perspective

Put a symmetry modifier on your poly

... and make a slice plane here ...

we need to be able to pull out a face to cover the hull ... collapse symmetry and pull back these edges:

should look sort of like this from the bottom

You need to do a little deleting and capping to make the insides work

Slice plane

remove and cap border

more slice planes, connects, caps, etc

With various adjustments ... even going back to FFD to resolve the bottom part of the hull to make sure it fits ... hopefully you get to something like this:

From the bottom, this guy is his own weird shape, so he will get extruded from a spline and boolean’ed

Mirrored and extruded with vertex adjustments

Make a cylinder with 2 cap levles and tilt and FFD into place ... remember we will have shell on the hull of cover overlaps

There are various parts of this model i will do over esp. around the cabin booleans.