Engines

The Millennium Falcon's engines are part of what makes the ship really unique to me.  We've all seen the typical rocket engines and jet engines before, but the Falcon is really one of the few ships in Star Wars (and really anywhere else) that has something different; a strip that covers a quarter of the rear of the ship and is really more radial than directional.  This design has definitely evolved and become more fleshed out over the years, and of course it wouldn't be the Falcon if any two versions of it were totally alike!

Originally the 5 foot filming model built for A New Hope had engines that were a strip of frosted glass that was back-lit.

While this was super effective in the original trilogy's theatrical release as the ship flew by camera on film, we hadn't really seen what the Falcon's engines looked like powered down.  The special editions in the late 90s expanded on the design with this shot of the Falcon blasting its way out of Mos Eisley Spaceport:

I was 11 years old when I first saw this shot and I remember being absolutely amazed by it.  I had never even considered what might be behind the bright light that was the Falcon's engines.  I definitely think of that moment as a turning point for me because from then on, I was completely fascinated by the inner workings of spaceships.

Eventually more designs started to surface.  The DK cutaway books from the 90s were books I stared at for hours at a time throughout my young adulthood and the Falcon cutaway depicts the engines like this:

Several years later The Haynes Manual offered this diagram:

While I don't wholly agree with what these artists have done with the ship, what I love about these two books is that artistic license was taken to make practical sense of things.  I had never thought of it as a small child but when I read the cutaway book for the first time I remember thinking, "Of course the engines would need thrust vector plates, and of course they would need to be thick for the amount of thrust the Falcon would generate."  These were formative experiences to be sure.  I know now that the flaps on the filming miniatures don't even have any separation between them.
Contrary to what I saw in these books, I always felt that the Falcon's engines needed to occupy more space on the inside of the ship.  On the top of the engine deck are six massive cooling fans, so in my opinion what lies beneath has to warrant a need for them.  I'll talk more about the Falcon interior later, but what I ended up building in terms of the basic shape of the exhaust manifold and the flaps is a combination of what I saw in these two books.  The pistons on top of the flaps were built from reference of the 5 foot filming miniature.  Here's a close up of one engine section:

And here's an animated breakdown of the various engine parts:

One of the joys of being a 3D modeler and building something modular like the Falcon's engines is that you only need to build one piece and then duplicate it around.  Building these sections early on was really satisfying because it covered such a large area of the ship and started to give me an idea of the scale of details to come.

That's all I have to say about the model this week, but I did have fun exploring what the engines would look like powered up.  In Keyshot I was able to get a pretty cool looking result in a pretty short amount of time (I did add a bit of a glow in Photoshop though.)  Without further adieu, let's kick the tires and light the fires!

As always, thanks for reading!  Next time: Quad Cannons!

Boarding Ramp

I had a lot of fun modeling the boarding ramp.  It was one of the first things I tackled because it was featured in the Star Wars: The Blueprints book as shown:

This drawing is of the set from The Empire Strikes Back and as I mentioned before, because of its massive size, this set was scaled down.  What I've modeled is slightly larger than this so no one has to duck to board the ship (except maybe Chewie, but I don't think they had Wookiees in mind when they designed her.)  One of the things I like about this drawing is the notch cut out of the corner so the ramp can rest on the ground.  This is something that exists on every set but on none of the filming miniatures.

Shortly after building the parts I began playing around with animation and I realized something.  The ramp has to get longer as it lowers.

The blueprint drawing shows that the pivot point of the ramp is where the outer surface of it meets the surface of the docking tunnel, but when I rotated my ramp in maya I noticed that the lowered ramp was shorter than it appeared in the drawing.  Also the drawing shows the struts lowering straight down through a narrow channel, but the distance between the pivot points changes in the raised and lowered positions.  My solution was to build ramp parts that slide (similar to a full extension drawer slide) in order to properly extend the ramp.  It's difficult to see here, but this is my final animation (with bonus landing gear!)

Here's a view up the ramp.  The geometry back there is not detailed whatsoever.  I'm currently working on modeling the interior and eventually I will be adding detail to this section.

The last thing I want to mention today is really more of a tease for a later post, but it's something I noticed right away and I find it pretty amusing.

The Falcon interior set's floorplan is always shown as being flat, but the Hans in this image show a 3 foot distance between where the floor is defined in the ramp schematics and the floor of the cockpit.  The ship of riddles strikes again!

Next week:  Engines!

Landing Gear

One of the first things I modeled was the Falcon's landing gear, mainly because these great blueprints are available online.

I decided to model my Falcon with 5 sets of landing gear.  In A New Hope the Falcon model and set were built with 3, as you can see in these images, (first a screengrab of the ANH set, second an image from RPF user Jaitea's Millennium Falcon Differences thread)

Two additional landing gear boxes were added for The Empire Strikes Back, presumably to better support the weight of the full Millennium Falcon set.  Some write this change off as some of Han's "special modifications."  I always preferred the look of the landing gear box configuration from ESB because it seemed like a more balanced design.  To me it looked goofy with the big box on the back and nothing up front.  Needless to say I wanted my model to have the two forward landing gear boxes.

Here is a quick animation test of the landing gear deploying and retracting:

The way the doors open was something I had a lot of fun figuring out.  I knew the doors on the set were cut into thirds with notched edges on the panels.  You can see in this screen grab that 2 of the 3 fold up on themselves with the help of some pistons.

I also referred to this image from the Haynes Manual on how to construct the door mechanisms.  (Note the difference in scale between the ships in these two images...  not even close!)

The thing that bothers me about the Falcon's landing gear design is there is an implication that they are like shock absorbers that can collapse into the hull of the ship, but the big blocky elements don't allow for very much compression.  The bays I had to extrude into the landing gear boxes were really cavernous to accommodate the gear. Also, in order to make the landing gear reach both the ground and the ceiling of the landing gear bays I had to make the struts so long that they stuck out of the top of the ship when fully retracted. (One of the landing gear bays totally intersects with the cockpit tube, but we'll get into interior v. exterior discrepancies later!)  You can see my solution to these problems in the animation; landing gear bay ceilings that move down with the landing gear.  This animation is not without it's flaws though.  You can see on the aft landing gear there is a small piston that materializes through the ceiling.  I will work harder to figure all of these things out when I do the animation rig.

The Falcon's landing gear is always depicted in the sets and matte paintings as having hoses hanging down alongside the landing gear.  I haven't included them with my landing gear because I feel like they would get caught and/or damaged by the mechanism.  That being said, I do think they add a certain extra level of detail and scale so they may be something I add later.

As always, thank you for reading!  Next time: The Boarding Ramp!