Through the course of the series I’ll try to explain how to model different air, sea and land military vehicles. Also, I’ll explain how to use different modeling techniques to get more realistic results.  In this tutorial we’ll focus on the Imperial Japanese Navy Air Service carrier-based fighter aircraft, Mitsubishi A6M2, also known as Zero.

All the files necessary for this tutorial can be downloaded here.

 http://www.tutorialscentral.com/images/stories/3ds/Mitsubishi a6m2 Zero modeling - Part 1/Part1.zip

Setting the scene

Before we begin the actual modeling process, we need to set up reference pictures in the viewports.

Note: Scene with already set up reference planes is located in the Part1.zip file.

 So, create 3 planes, in their corresponding viewports that have the dimensions of the reference pictures (height and width segments should be set to 1). Also move them so they are positioned like in the perspective view.

Select all 3 planes, right click and choose Properties. In General tab, check Freeze and uncheck Show Frozen in Gray. Click OK to save the settings. By doing this, we don’t have to worry that we’ll accidentally select and/or move the reference planes.

Now we are ready to begin.

Modeling

Create a cylinder (12 sides, 5 height segments) in the front viewport.

Go to Object Properties and change the Visibility to 0.75.  Now we can see the reference pictures behind the model.

Switch to the side view and move the vertices to lengthen the cylinder and start roughing in the airplane’s body.

While still in side view, use move and scale tools to adjust the vertices to follow the outline of the airplane.

Now, change to Top view and adjust the vertices with the scale tool.

Select the big polygon on the front of the body and delete it.

Select the edges of the polygon you just deleted. Press shift and hold it while you move the edges to the left. This action copied selected edges and created new polygons between old and new edges (“shift +” option also works with the scale tool). Repeat this action once more and then use the scale tool to scale down those edges like in the next picture.

Next, create the front of the body using shift + scale and shift + move.

Select the polygons as shown on the next picture and extrude them a little bit to make a hump.