Project—Build a Spaceship - Page 8

The next logical step after learning the bare fundamentals of viewing, drawing primitives, and transforming them is building a fun, engaging model that we can use in an animation. We are going to build a spaceship (with guns, of course— why else would you go to space, except to shoot at things?). Feel free to compose your own, as you could hardly avoid improving on my design. This is just an exercise to demonstrate the concepts we have covered so far.

1. Start in front view, with the z-plane as the active grid (hot key Z).

2. Choose the pyramid primitive tool and click on the grid in the front view to start drawing the base. Click again when you are satisfied with the shape of the base, and once more when you are satisfied with the overall shape. Figure 20-5 shows my shape. I prefer to pull shapes out from the active grid, closer to myself, rather than away (the base of the primitive remains stationary and the volume of the shape gets closer). To make sure you are drawing with the base of the primitive on the active grid, just keep moving your mouse in the same direction that you used to draw the base.
   Figure 20.5 The hull of a spaceship

3. Switch to the cylinder primitive and draw two cylinders, again in the front view. The larger one (shown in Figure 20-6) is supposed to represent the mouth of the rockets that will stick out the back of the spaceship. Because it needs to be either aligned with or sunk into the back of the pyramid, I drew it so that the volume of the shape goes away from the active grid. To do this, drag your mouse the opposite direction for the volume as you did for drawing the base. If you want the base to be perfectly round, hold down the SHIFT key as you draw the base. Also draw a gun, as the infinite universe seems to be a hostile territory nowadays, filled with English-speaking hominids with funny prosthetics glued to their faces (this must be what makes them bad-natured).
   Figure 20.6 Using the default alignment to draw spaceship components

4. Finally, draw a sphere. I made mine elongated to mimic small military aircraft, which seems to be the point of departure for spaceships in film and TV.

5. Your model should now be ready for assembly. First, position your rocket and gun at the correct vertical level. Then ALT-drag each of them on the x-axis to make a copy with the same y and z coordinates. Keep dragging until your new copy is where you want it and drop it. Place the originals by dragging with the x handle (you don't want to change the y or z coordinates at this point). Move your sphere into place, and you have a spaceship. My version is shown here.
   While 3D is definitely not a stronghold for instant gratification, a few notes are in order regarding the ratio of the difficulty of the work we have just done to the benefits of it. First of all, the exceedingly simple model we just created is impossible to create using a simple extrusion of a 2D image, which seems to be the most popular method of modeling for Flash at the time of writing. You can't make a pyramid or an elongated sphere by simple extrusion. (We will talk about better uses for extrusion in the next section.)

   Another key observation at this point is that the model is more or less recognizable as a spaceship. This is a good lesson for beginning modelers: primitives can be used as a point of departure for any form. In fact, for the majority of known European art history, the idea of conceptualizing all objects as primitive shapes was a staple of 2D painting education. Even experienced modelers who create low-poly models for games point- by-point, manually adding, subtracting, and moving points, often start from a simple cube.

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   Transformation Tools - Page 7
   Macromedia Flash 5 Developer's Guide
   Modeling Basics Using Strata - Page 9