A-10 Warthog: 3D Modeling Software Project

Paul Peters - Computer Science 3710

(Original)

(Paul's Model)

 

Quick Summary of model: This project is the constuction and modeling of an A-10 Warthog war plane.

 

Step 1.

I started by placing a cylinder at the center of my 3d world. Then rotated it 90 degrees and used the extrude tool to lengthen the cylinder for my A-10’s fuselage.

I have shrunk the back of the fuselage so that I can start to fashion a tail on the plane.

Step 2.

When putting the tail of the plane together, I resized a cube into flat looking rectangle for the main part of the tail and constructed 2 similar rectangles with beveled edges for the outer fins of the tail. After that I added elevators and rudders to the tail for more of a scale look. With the elevators and rudder, I took the edges closest to the rear and pinched them a little to make for a more aerodynamic look.

Step 3.

Next I will be modeling the turbines that are located near the middle of the plane above the main wings. For the turbines I used a rotated cylinder about the x axis and beveled the ends to get the look of the turbines. I then scaled the cylinder to the approx. size and dropped the center of the cylinder to make the turbine look semi-hollow and added a small extremely bevelled cylinder to the front of the turbine engine. I then duplicated this turbine so that I could have one turbine on each side of the plane.

Step 4.

With the wings I have used the bevel tool to get the curvature of the wings along with adding Loop Cut and Slide spots to angle the wing properly. After I got the wing size correctly I added a protrusions under the wing to hold the landing gear. The objects under the wing were separate cylinders that I merged to be a part of the wing. Once one of the wings was completed, I duplicated and mirrored the wing to the other side.

Step 5.

For the end part of my modeling I ended up redoing the fuselage and started from scratch with a cube and turned it into a more scale looking A-10 fuselage using the bevel tool and Loop cut. Once I had the dimensions and shape right I added a cockpit by beveling and skewing a cube. And finally adding the iconic GAU-8 Gatling gun to the nose of the A-10 warthog.

The last couple touch ups are a couple simple textures and added background image.

Conclusion.

Some of the difficulties that I encountered during this project included creating a scale looking fuselage (due to its unique shape) and developing aerodynamic wings that matched the same angles and similar look of an A-10. Each of these components involved tricky use of the Loop cut tool so that I was able to manipulate the object symmetrically. Overall I found this model rewarding to create but very tedious at times, since it took several hours just to get certain aspects of the plane to look scale and proportional, such as the fuselage.