BUILDING A BETTER FIGHTER

As soon as I settled on the finished design for the F300 Space Superiority fighter that is sort of a cornerstone in Grease Monkey, I dreamed of one day lifting it off the printed page and holding it in my hands as a solid object. You know, the kind an action figure could fit into. That day hasn’t come yet, but I did have an opportunity a few years ago to get about halfway there.

In the first half of this decade, some of the TV cartoons I worked on were moving into the complex world of computer-generated (CG) animation. The technology had finally dipped into the reach of TV budgets and swept me into such projects as Heavy Gear, Max Steel, and MTV’s Spider-Man. Drawing storyboards for CG has very different demands than the traditional hand-drawn (or “2-D”) technique, so I took the opportunity to sign up for a class in 3-D modeling using Maya, which was and still is the software of choice for many CG animators.
Reasoning that such a class would teach me some valuable things about storyboarding for CG, I dug in and learned what I could. Our instructor gave us a number of small-scale assignments that culminated in a big one: to model anything of our choosing using the techniques he’d taught us. As soon as those words entered my head I knew what I was going to build: the F300.

The gallery below shows the results. In fact, this website has displayed one of the results from day one in the fighter blueprint that sits behind the text you’re reading now. Mapping it out on paper was the first step toward mapping it out in the virtual world. Naturally, some minor modifications had to be made (as is always the case when you add or subtract a dimension) but it was still quite a charge to see how closely the “real thing” matched what I had been drawing for so long.

My television work since then has stayed almost entirely in the 2-D realm, and as a result I don’t remember much about Maya except that it’s one of the steepest learning curves I’ve ever been on and I hope it gets easier before I’m called back to it. Meanwhile, I have many fond memories of watching this baby take shape…