For My 3710 Project I thought I would do something different than a building
of some sort. Since the Lancaster museum in Nanton is a very well known land
mark in Alberta I chose to model a Lancaster Bomber. The Lancaster was primarily
a British / Canadian bomber that was used extensively during world war 2. This is a picture of an old Lancaster. For this project I chose to use 3DS MAX, since they have a free 30 day trial
period. I found this project to be very challenging and I probably should have
done a building of some sort since I think that using flat surfaces and simple
geometric shapes would have been challenging enough! I basically built this model by using the tutorials supplied in
3DS max, first modelling the chess set then skipping the rest to do the
P38 Lightning which is a WW2 plane that has a very different shape than the Lancaster. WW2. The
P38 has two pontoons, a very different fuselage, and a totally different tail
section. However the use of this tutorial proved to be invaluable as it taught
be the basic requirements to model the Lancaster. This project was done to proportionate scale (with simple models of a toy
model kit for a Lancaster). Below is a rendered image of my completed model. It consists of these main pieces: Each of these objects
were created using 3d simple objects that were converted to
editable polygons for vertex manipulation. I used bevelling, tapering,
curving, extrusion, soft selection, scaling, moving, and rotation, but my
saviour was the non uniform scale and move function which I used in Top, Front,
and side views to scale the model according to the JPG "blueprints" for the
Lancaster. The turrets proved a challenge until I decided to take a short cut
and just use spheres and cylinders the were rotated, overlapped and moved 'into'
the fuselage. It turned out not TOO bad but had I more time I could have done
better. The British Icon and Piccadilly Princess textures proved difficult to me
so I just created planes and melded them into the wings and fuselage.
(Basically a cheat). In fact All texturing was tricky and I had to make my own
Camouflage and engine textures. The propellers were stolen from the P 38 tutorial. Basically it has 1
propeller which I then cloned and rotated then gave a black texture. Then I
cloned three more of these trios and positioned them properly. I did not spend an overly great amount of time on the environment.
Basically I wimped out and had to work on other projects. SO I experimented with
a city of Calgary back drop, and two Environment global backgrounds, a "blue
sky" and a "night sky" background. I wanted to experiment more with lighting
however I was getting time compressed. My idea was to use a spot light to shine
on the plane but I could not get it to work correctly. Instead I used a simple
Omni-light which I THINK is working but I am still not to sure. I also learned how use and manipulate the various windows in the
software, and how to hide, group, and link objects which was an invaluable
skill. This project taught me a lot about modelling and using materials
to wrap the model with. I felt it was quite difficult learning the millions of
3DS max buttons and I got lost in the many menu and window layers that seem to
pop up unending. Overall I am happy and proud of my final result even though I
had higher hopes and dreams about a more completed finished project with
armaments and transparent cock[it and turrets and a far superior texturing of
the main body. However I feel that this was an excellent first attempt at
modelling and I am happy with the overall result. This last picture is some fancy
wire frame render thing-a-ma-gig super happy magic double dragon voodoo button
that I pressed and up came this picture. I saved it as a JPG and never did
figure out how I got it in the first place. But it looked cool so here it
is.
Ken Maclean 3710 Project, 2006
