Force Awakens TIE Fighters (work in progress...)

Special Forces (two-seater) TIE

Standard TIE

and side-by-side.

Photomatching the New Falcon

12-13-14 Update

12-18-14 Update

engine deck parts. Most of these bits are consistent with the 5' studio scale model from the first three films, but there are a lot of proportional differences.

hmm, here's something kind of fun. Uploaded a lower poly version to Sketchfab, take a look below.

Ep7 Millennium Falcon WIP by finfito on Sketchfab

Greeblies for Everybody!

TIEs

another bit of something I'm working on.

Laundry List

In my apparent mission to build models of everything that appears in A New Hope, I still have a long long way to go. At the very least, it looks like I've got quite a bit of the ships done. Here's my Got-It-Don't-Got-It-Need-It list...

In rough order of appearance (A word on what I'm considering a ship; any conveyance built as a prop and committed to celluloid, no matter how obscure, that's not a space station.) Don't-Got-It's are in bold text.

1. Rebel Blockade Runner                        Got It (but exterior needs a lot of work)
2. Star Destroyer ("Devastator")               Got It (but exterior needs a looooot of work)
3. Escape Pod                                            Got It!
4. Sand Crawler                                        Got It!
5. Luke's Speeder                                    Got It!
6. Lars Family Speeder                             Got It
7. T-16 Skyhopper                                    Got It
8. Mos Eisley Speeder (Lars with paint)  Got It (technically, just need to repaint the other model)
9. Mos Eisly Wreck next to the cantina   Got It
10. "Ubrikkian" speeder                            Got It
11. Void-Spider TX-3                               Got It
12. Mobquet Speeder                                Got It
13. Millennium Falcon                             Got It
14. TIE Fighter                                         Got It
15. Rebel base troop transport                  Got It
16. X-Wing                                               Got It
17. Y-Wing                                               Got It
18. Vader's TIE                                         Got It

So 15 out of 18... not bad... did I miss anything? (I am not, will never, be counting any ships seen in the "special" editions)

 ------updated------

It has been brought to my attention that two are missing. The Dewback and the Jerba are both technically "conveyances built as a props and committed to celluloid, [are] obscure, [and are] not space stations."

... I'm not sure where I stand on this issue, but what it comes down to is that modeling those two "animals" would be a real pain in Sketchup, which is not the best for organic objects. We shall see... either way, I have begun to collect rare photo references of them, so it may just be a matter of time.

thanks to Exxos of the RPF

 ------updated 12/23/13------

what a weekend! Knocked out the Void-Spider, Mobquet Speeder, mostly polished off the Ubrikkian Speeder, and bashed out the Escape Pod.

Just two more to go: Vader's TIE, and Luke's Landspeeder

 ------updated 3/26/2019------

Lord I've been at this a long time... I've added one more ship and not really cleaned up the remaining details on the other ones. Gotta get to work! Probably have to rebuild a lot considering how much I've learned since 2013...

Size Comparison

An updated version of the size comparison chart I started this blog out with, now that I have some new models.

TIE Fighter

Interior based on production blueprints, and carefully reconstructed from screencaps and behind the scenes images. This is a basically never before seen view of the TIE interior (there have been many interpretations over the years, but none that really come close to what's actually seen in the first Star Wars movie) The pilot is a very rough mock up, just so the ship isn't empty. The chair is my embellishment, and is based on the Martin Baker ejection seat featured in the cockpit (with the distinctive headrest removed)

Exterior work in progress

and here's the cockpit

Don't get cocky...

The composition popped into my head over lunch. I had all the models built, so I thought I'd give it a try. Not too shabby, even if I say so. 

Classic Size Comparison Chart (Part 2)

As a follow up to Part 1, I've added a basic model of the Blockade Runner, based on Mike Marincic's excellent orthgraphic drawings. I've also used his scale for the Tantive, which puts the ship at about 495' long. As you can see, she's quite a bit bigger than the scale drawing originally indicated.

(click to enlarge)

I suspect that the scale of this drawing was based on the second iteration of the Blockade Runner, when it first transformed from being an early Millennium Falcon:

as you can see from the windows of the hammerhead section, the scale was quite a bit smaller than the final model eventually implied.

 And now, for fun, here are some renders of all the ships stacked up together, as they might be seen from an observer standing on the ground, taking in the scale in person... (Click any, to enlarge.)

Classic Size Comparison Chart

 (Click to enlarge)


The drawing on the left was created around the production time of Star Wars A New Hope, to show the relative size comparisons of the major vehicles. It's an old favorite of mine, and has appeared in several Making of Star Wars books. Recently, I've been building replicas, in Sketchup, of the full scale movie props from A New Hope, (using production blueprints) and I wanted to see how the sizes of the real full scale props matched up to this charming chart.

I started with the x-wing, the movie prop of which was about 39' long, and scaled the drawing to fit. With that ship in place as a reference point, I pulled in my model of the Millennium Falcon, which comes in at about 86'+. At that point, the relative scales in the drawing actually seemed to be looking pretty good. I don't yet have a complete TIE fighter, but then there never was a full scale prop constructed for that. There are blueprints from pre-production of the TIE Fighter studio model, but they don't have exact dimensions. So, I went by the cockpit set of the TIE Fighter, which is noted in Rinzler's Star Wars the Blueprints as being 7' 6" wide on the inside. Adding another 6" total for a theorized bulkhead thickness of 3" brought the sphere of the exterior cockpit to about 8' ( a measurement that comes up a lot in set design on ANH. The Falcon's cockpit, for instance, has an 8' diameter, as do her corridors.). With those dimensions in place, the rudimentary TIE Fighter model I drew up from those studio model blueprints fit the scale comparison drawing perfectly.

Next was the Sandcrawler. The fullscale set built for the Sandcrawler, seen when R2 and 3P0 are sold to Uncle Owen, only had the crawler's caterpillar tracks and entry gangway, with a bit of skirting over the treads to imply the rest of the vehicle looming above the actors and droids. I built my model from production blueprints of the full scale treads themselves, and then added the rest of the hulking machine scaling up a recreation the studio scale model used in the miniature shots. The results show that the scale drawing of the Sandcrawler, in the old comparison chart, was a bit on the small side.

I've yet to built a Y-wing, an old favorite of mine, but that will come soon. It seems probable that the Y-wing will fit as nicely as the X-Wing, Falcon, and TIE Fighter.

The Blockade Runner is going to present some problems of its own, since I think it's pretty obvious that the scale is not quite right to what's implied in the movie. Of course there was no full scale set of the Tantive exterior ever built, so I'll have to extrapolate from the interior movie sets, and use my imagination a bit.

Anyone familiar with this drawing will note that I cut off the final comparison between the Blockade Runner and a Star Destroyer. At this point, that's an issue for another day.