The Start of the Aircraft Carrier

This will be one of the models which will be used in the final project to show the events of pearl harbour except with a fantasy twist for the audience to use their imagination more. This will be a flying aircraft carrier which sounds slightly odd seeing as why is there a need for aircrafts to be carrying other aircrafts but since its fantasy based imagination will be the key to hopefully keep the audience interested in the animation.

This first post will be how the more basic shape was created and the detail will follow more in stages.

The first object used to shape the aircraft carrier was the “Box” object and a rectangular shape was formed and the key to creating the first basic shape is using all the 3ds max views at the same time so that accuracy can be achieved which is important for the final look of the ship.

The box was converted into an editable poly and more faces were added using the “Swift Loop” tool so that more faces and edges where available to help shape the carrier.

This particular carrier was shaped from the Akagi Aircraft Carrier used in the attack against Pearl Harbour so that although this is fantasy the original beginning shape came from the original source which may show that the Japanese evolved in this fantasy time.

This is the website used to obtain the top view of the Akagi Carrier which was used to make the basic shape of this aircraft carrier. The website address is below.

http://www.nauticos.com/midway/IJNwreckanalysis-akagi.htm

Once the shape is achieved it needs to be cut in half and one of those half needs to be deleted depending on which side is preferred by the user but it doesn’t matter because the symmetry tool will be used to acquire the other half of the ship.

Once half of the ship is achieved a wing should be extruded or pulled out of the back end of the carrier depending on the user’s choice but for this project it was pulled using the points element of “Editable Poly Mode”. Still using all four screens of 3ds max the aircraft carrier should look like this image below.

 

 

Now the extra extrusion from the ship is the next part of the ship because although the ship now has wings there is no explanation for how it would move forward or backwards and since it’s an aircraft carrier banking should be out the question because all the aircrafts on board will simply fall off.

Basically the extra extrusion is the shaping of jets for the bottom of the ship to help with simple direction.

This didn’t really look very fantasy or sci-fi so it was removed and a tail jet sort of thing was formed on the top side of the ship to give the ship more of a weird but appealable look.

 

The image below shows the full ship again with the symmetry so that an insight of the final outcome can be viewed.

 

This then lead to the question as the ship can now sort of move forward but how was it going to get in the air so the thought of using huge fans within the wings to give the necessary elevation would solve that particular problem so the wing the and the back end of the ship had to be corrected accordingly so that the fan would fit into the wing nicely and there was enough space on the bottom to let air through so the fans would work. The picture below shows the type of work which was carried which is basically straight forward in the wing being dragged to a higher level and a point being added so that the wing would have the required volume for the fan to fit in to the wing. The bottom half of the back end was just bridged across to cover the whole