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!