Design Progression and finalisation - Ahmed Bhutta

So, through the summer months, I continued to develop and build on ideas as the arena was being reworked. I felt that the ship needed to give the futuristic feel in the same way that the arena did. Working from references and feedback from the group, I had came up with this:

I still wasn't happy with the outcome and it didn't seem to fit in with the rest of the scene. I had attempted to make a rotationally mechanism for the jets, but the jets just didn't seem to go with the ship any longer. I had created landing gear for the ship with hydraulics to give the impression of futurism. My references for it was a tutorial I saw on digital tutors on a futuristic ship they were doing of their own. I had watched it to gain a better understanding of the mechanism.

I developed the weapon housing further and added a missile to the guns along with bolts to the wings so that the engineering of the ship would make sense. I got the idea for the missile from the earlier photo manipulation concept I did in photoshop from the photos I took at the RAF museum. I think it fits in with the restive the ship appropriately.

Being not totally satisfied with the outcome and taking suggestions form the rest of my group, I continued with the ship to get a better look. I ended up with the following:

So I added a few intricate details to the ship and a bit more shape to make it less boxy and for it to have more of a natural flowing line to it. I went back to my RAF Museum photos, blogged earlier on, and decided to incorporate the back end of a helicopter I had taken a photo of. I thought the ship was taking its place within the scene a lot more now but still decided to make some final adjustments to it for it to have its final look and feel. I again referred back to the photos I had taken and this is the outcome:

After all of my development, this is my final ship that I had come up with. I decided to chuck the Jets as it just didn't seem to fit into the ship any longer and after going through some more of my photos and looking at Deviant Art, I decided to add propellers at the top of the ship to create a Heli-Ship. before embarking on this design, I had done a rough sketch outlining my idea as I knew exactly what I wanted it to look like. I had added some shape to the wing as when they were straight, it didn't seem streamlined at all and just came across very boxy and un-natural. I had added guns to the nose of the ship adding detail overall and two on the back with a dome camera as before the area seemed quite empty.  added a back door with hydraulics and I rounded off the top panel of the body which before was squared off. Finally I added panels on the weapon housing and smoothed the whole ship to give it a cleaner look.

I researched how propeller wings actually worked so that when I built them, it made sense and so they would work appropriately when it came to animating them also. The link which I looked at is below:

http://www.explainthatstuff.com/helicopter.html

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rJb1EZtnzFk

Below is also some references I was looking at when deciding the overall look of the ship:

I also took into account what Mantas had sent me which was a preliminary idea for the tail of the ship. I took this on board also.