Wednesday, July 27, 2016

Armor Plating

The "paneled spaceship" look is a staple of the Star Wars aesthetic.    The filming miniatures are covered with sheets of styrene and the sets with 3/4 inch plywood.  Within the Star Wars universe the Millennium Falcon is almost completely covered with "durasteel and duralloy" armor plating.  I initially decided I wanted my armor plating to be substantial enough to withstand the laser blasts and asteroid hits that occur in the movies and started by making panels that were a full inch thick.  I ultimately found that anything more than 3/4 of an inch felt too thick.  For all intents and purposes, the thickness of my armor plating matches the set.
Before I go any further into the build though I'd like to talk a bit about my modeling process.  For those who don't know much about polygon modeling, this video explains it in very basic terms.  The problem with polygon edges is that they are mathematically perfect, which is to say more perfect than anything that exists in the real world.  Even the edge of a knife has a radius that will catch light.  The way to create these radii in cg is to simply add more polygons and/or subdivide the mesh at render time.  When I started this build I knew the resulting model would have a very heavy polycount and could take a long time to render.  Since my goal for this model is VR, which renders in real time, I knew I had to find a better way.  Video games render in real time and get around the problem of heavy geometry by using textures (specifically normal maps) to make very light and optimized geometry look like it has the resolution of a denser mesh.  Before deciding what to do I put together this test in maya using various techniques to achieve my desired panel look.  The ultimate goal was a model that was light as it could be while still looking good.
I decided to make my geometry minimal and use the mental ray round corners shader to simulate the look of a radius on extremely light geometry.  The renders I've been showing so far are from Keyshot, which has a similar effect, but here's a closeup of the effect in a maya/mental ray render (and a sneak preview!)
The other interesting thing this shader creates is a radius at geometry intersections.  It almost makes it look to me like everything has a thick coat of paint on it, which is kind of what I want in this case.  All this is a bump mapping trick, but I think from a certain distance it works extremely well.  The plan is to bake the effect down to a texture map when I do the final paint job.  

Anyway, enough technical nonsense!

While it's only been a week since my last post, modeling these panels took a lot of time and required a lot of reference.  If you search for images of the Millennium Falcon you'll find endless variations of the Falcon's panel layout.  The differences between the 5 foot and 3 foot filming miniatures is partially to blame.  In this thread RPF user Jaitea has explored some of these differences.
While modeling my panels, I had fantastic reference of the top of the 5 foot filming miniature thanks to the photogrammetry work by RPF user vfxsup64 in this thread (these images were instrumental in figuring out the scale of some of the greebles later on).

What I didn't have was good reference of the bottom.  I did however have the blueprint drawing of the bottom panel layout of the set (half of it anyway).
Comparing that against my photo reference I found this panel layout and the 5 foot filming miniature for that side to be fairly close.  The rest I simply eyeballed from photo reference.  Since my model was already an idealized mishmash from several sources of reference I decided I couldn't be too precious about it matching exactly.  Later when I uncovered better reference of the bottom I found that I was pretty close.  (Bear in mind this bottom view predates the forward landing gear boxes which were added for The Empire Strikes Back.)

Something else I wanted to mention is that the Falcon's panels all have notched edges which I always thought added a nice level of complexity to the partlines.  On the filming miniature a device called a nibbler was used to achieve this look.  I used a similar workflow with booleans in maya.  In addition to the large panels, the Falcon is covered with small patch panels I like to call chiclets.  I included them with this post because the workflow and reference I used to make them is the same.

I hope you guys enjoyed and maybe learned something.  As always, I welcome any questions or comments!

Next time: Landing Gear!

Wednesday, July 20, 2016

Terminology

Before I post more progress I'd like to do a mini post about Millennium Falcon naming conventions I will be using.  Nautical terminology provides a standard for describing direction.  I've put together this image to illustrate these terms and their meaning: 
The following diagram illustrates standard naming conventions for the different parts of the Falcon.  I've referenced Robert Brown's Ship of Riddles site for these terms.
That's all for now!  I highly recommend further exploration of Robert Brown's site;  it's full of great information on the Falcon and poses some interesting solutions to the ships design conundrums.

Wednesday, July 13, 2016

Base Model: How big is the Falcon?

This is my final base model, but the base model is something that changed a lot over the course of the build.  Since Falcon models and sets come in all different shapes and sizes I needed to take artistic license and make decisions about what scale I wanted my Falcon to be.  The image I immediately think of when I imagine how big the Falcon would be is the set/matte painting combo of the Falcon on the landing pad on Bespin.
Since I had a copy of Star Wars: The Blueprints I knew how big the set actually was.  However, I also knew from my research that this set was actually scaled down.  I never did like the way everyone had to duck to get up the boarding ramp.
Starting the base model began with overlaying all the reference on planes in Maya and lining things up.  In addition to the blueprints book, I used images from the Haynes Manual as well as line drawings and photogrammetry from vfxsup64 and maruska from the RPF.  Eventually part of a Wired article released a great top view of the Falcon taken by Dan Winters.  Here's my Falcon alongside it:
The armor plating overhang aside, mine is close to the 5 foot filming miniature proportionally.  However, I did take some liberties; favoring intention over execution.  For example, I took the asymmetry out of the access pit shapes on either side of the engine deck as well as on the mandibles. I just imagined that the Corellian Engineering Corp would have designed these details to be symmetrical.  One other major difference is the profile of the docking rings on either side, which I let these blueprints of the boarding ramp dictate:
When I was happy with the proportions I decided on scale.  The Hayne's Manual lists the Falcon's scale as 34.37 meters (around 113 feet) which is in my opinion too large.  I've heard that this number was decided upon as an effort to compensate for the large size of the interior set which would never in a million years fit inside the exterior set.  My mind kept going back to that image of Bespin.  I knew my blueprints of the bottom and the ramp weren't the full scale of the ship, but I did have blueprints of the cockpit interior that were the proper scale.  I therefore scaled my base model and reference up to match the scale of the cockpit.
This brought me to a Falcon that is 89.9 feet (27.4m) in length.  Here are a couple of orthographic views with a 6 foot Han for scale.

The end result is a Falcon that feels like the set but wouldn't require too much ducking to board.

The Millennium Falcon is often called the "ship of riddles" because trying to make sense of it often turns up more questions than answers.  This makes it a ripe topic for debate.  I laid it on the line that this build represents what the ideal Falcon is to me ...but what do you think?

Next time: Armor plating!

What a piece of junk!

Welcome to my Millennium Falcon blog!  I've loved the Falcon since I first laid eyes on her as a child and over the past year and a half or so I've been modeling my ideal Falcon in Maya.  What began as a fun personal project soon evolved into obsession.  The exterior model is complete as I write this.  I'm currently working on modeling a version of the interior (I have some issues with some of the published blueprints) and soon I'd like to learn Substance Designer and Substance Painter as I texture the ship. My ultimate goal is to get everything into VR.  For now I'm only going to tease the final model because showing it would ruin the fun!
Soon I will begin posting build progress and giving information about my thought process and workflow.  First I feel have to give credit to those who truly inspired and fostered this build.  It all started when I found this thread by user Gort on the Replica Prop Forum which contains a detailed list and reference photos of almost all of the model kits used in the 70s on the 5 foot filming miniature.   This led me to Studio Scale Modelers who have tons of flatbed scans of these kit parts.  I searched far and wide for reference on the RPF and found a ton of useful and inspiring threads.  Here are some of my favorites:

This site by Neil K. offers a great and thorough history of the Falcon miniatures and sets

There are countless others that are all a wealth of information and other users who contribute immensely to these forums.  I encourage you all to go down the rabbit hole and get lost in there for a few hours!  I should note that I also found these collections of reference photos by Andre Bustanoby and David Emmerichs invaluable.

I hope you all enjoy my work.  If anyone has any technical questions or general comments feel free to leave 'em.  Thanks!