Monday, November 18, 2019

Mandalorian

The Mandalorian is great, if you follow this blog at all and haven't seen it, get to it. This is basically everything I loved about playing with action figures right up there on the screen and then some. It's both fun and satisfying, the world REALLY feels like Star Wars and I can't wait to see more. I haven't built anything from it yet, but you can bet I will be soon... too many people have been pumping out great Razorcrest models, so I probably won't be tackling that directly...  though for some reason I keep having this image of what a Colin Cantwell prototype version might look like.

in the meantime here's an unrelated update on the Mos Eisely Wreck model I've been poking at here and there. I've begun to think about it as essentially the ship that Luke is talking about when he says to Han "We could almost buy our own ship for that!"



Monday, October 14, 2019

Sometimes you’re going through old files and you discover projects you worked on for months and then abandoned. Where on earth did I find the time for this?

Based on the Incredible Cross Sections book





Wednesday, October 2, 2019

Mos Eisley Wreck

One last hidden ship in A New Hope...







I received a message from a fan who had a sketch by John Barry from '75 that showed the intended shape of the wreckage





Here is my reconstruction





Friday, August 23, 2019

Yoda's Hovel

When I was a little kid, new to Star Wars, there was nothing cooler to me that Yoda's house. I remember when my little brother and I were about seven or eight, he happened to see Empire before me, and I was furious. I sat him down, notepad in hand, and demanded he describe Yoda's house in detail. I guess I was aware of the characters before I'd seen the movies somehow, and I needed to know what the old Jedi's digs were like. My brother tried his best, but couldn't make the imagery clear enough for me.


Years later, even after watching the scenes over and over, I still had a very murky picture until I came into possession of a copy of Rinzler's blueprints book. I finally got my clearest look via the drawings of Yoda's house.


 With some newfound skills at organic CG modeling, I got to work. The build was fun, it's such a crazy design, like a heart or an organ that folds back on itself. Unfortunately it turned out the actual set had diverged from the plans quite a bit, which is fairly common, and the finished product only roughly matched what was on screen. All kinds of windows were added or moved, shapes of doors and passages were completely changed. Ordinarily I would have tried to use my photomatching skills in sketchup to nail down the differences, but organic shapes are all but impossible to use to find the perspective line edges needed for that work. So I shelved it and went back to working on nice boxy objects like the ESB X-wing


Flash forward a few months and I found some production photos of Yoda's house with the sharp edge of a floor visible. Just out of curiosity I started playing around, building all new geometry and matching it with other photos. Suddenly the shapes started to come into focus, similar to the blueprints, but now much more accurate.





The model even matches up to the final dressed set in ESB.



more updates soon(ish) as I start to build out the little odds and ends that furnish the house.