I decided to create the Avro Arrow. The Avro Arrow (CF-105) was a Canadian designed and built delta-wing interceptor aircraft manufactured in Malton Ontario. The designing of the Arrow began in 1953 and was made to serve for the Royal Canadian Air Force from 1960 and beyond. The Arrow was a radical new design that could go at speeds of Mach2 at 50,000+ feet. The Arrow was a source of Canadian pride and a symbol of Canadian excellence. On February 20, 1959 design and production was abruptly cancelled, putting over 50,000 people out of work and creating a long political debate that is still a source of controversy today.
After Taking a quick look at Blender and POVRay, I decided to go with Autodesk Maya. Maya is an industry standard in 3d modeling and animation. I also found lots of helpful information on Maya including a series of YouTube videos on how to create an Airplane. This series on YouTube created by a professional instructor was the main source of training and learning. You can see a list of his video tutorial playlists here. The one I used was the playlist entitled "Principles of 3d Modeling". While modeling I took advantage of these orthographic images i found on Google. It really helped with getting the proportions of the Airplane right.
The first thing I learned was to save often, Maya is a can be a buggy program and can crash or produce unpredicted results! What I did was for every major transition I would save a new copy, i.e. Airplane_1, Airplane_2, etc. Another thing that I would have done differently was to make the geometry a little more smooth, doing this takes a bit of skill, a good eye and a lot of time.
Here a couple of rendered images from my model. If you would like to see the project file please email me at will.anderson@uleth.ca.
This was the first time that I have created anything in 3d. I found it quite interesting and am going to experiment some more outside of class. Creating a project like this has given me a good understanding on what goes into a 3d model, the terminology and its different uses. I also see that 3d modeling or animations involves continuous learning and experimentation.