Shaping the body

For our next project, we're going to build a futuristic shuttlecraft. The ship is fairly complex, but becomes easier when you break it down into distinct subsections. In this chapter, we'll work on getting the major shapes and components blocked out. It will start to look a lot less daunting by the time we're done!

First, let's take a look at our design:

If this looks familiar, that's because it was one of my first major Blender projects. I released it under the Creative Commons Non-Attribution license, which means anyone can use the model (or the design) for whatever they want.

We don't need to replicate this ship exactly, but we'll use it as a guide. I've made several versions over the years, and no two are exactly alike. We'll just think of it as concept art.

From the image, we can identify several key components and details that we'll want to pay attention to:

The first thing to focus on is the basic shape of the hull. You can see that the top and bottom sections are...