Star Fox: Arwing

It's been a while since the last update but we made it to 500 supporters, thanks again everyone for the support it really means a lot!

In the last update, I talked about the initial build design for the Arwing (the one with a shorter nose and longer wings). Today I'll talk about the first draft of the minifigures.

Here above you can see my initial drafts of the Star Fox crew, they look quite a bit different from the final version. I the time I didn't have any experience with mecha bricks or texturing, so these i drew in Photoshop. My method involved taking pictures of physical minifigures and then tracing them over with customs prints to resemble the Star Fox crew better. It was fun trying to pick from existing elements to try and best match each member's unique designs.

At the time I made the submission, Mecha bricks didn't have a lot of the head elements I used in their library, so with the exception of Peppy all the other crew use the standard minifigure head instead of unique elements. These are fun to look back at, but I think ultimately I'm happy I went on to make the 3D versions.

Thanks again for the continued support and I hope to see you all at the next update!

I feel like I should have made an update when we hit 100 and now we're 3 times that! Thanks so much for the support everyone, it's been incredibly exciting to watch the numbers soar up and up.

It might be fun to share some of the process work behind designing the model.

I've always wanted to upload something to Lego Ideas, but never really had the confidence to really give it a try until this year. I'm a huge fan of video games and knew that I wanted to design something around that. Star Fox is a game I really love and since the game revolves around the player controlling a Starship it was the perfect game to focus on since the ship is perhaps the most iconic element of the game itself.

I initially Started (I think back in November of 2022) designing the model in Stud.IO using reference photos and a model of the Arwing from Star Fox Battle for Atlas. Having the physical model in my hands made a huge difference designing the ship since I can look at it from any angle.

When designing, The biggest challenges were G-Diffusers and the Wings. Ensuring the G-Diffusers were at the right angle and shape while remaining durable took a lot of iteration and different methods. I think they turned out pretty well, even if they're much closer to the Star Link design than any other version. It was imperative for me that as a play feature, the wings could switch between corridor and all range mode. Had to get very creative with the joints to ensure the wings can properly be adjusted. They work pretty well as is, but since submission I've had a I've other ideas of how they could be implemented better.

Below I have a few photos from one of my earlier designs. I felt that both the nose was too short, and the wings were too big. I eventually increased and decreased the size of each respectively. The proportions feel much better now!