The LEGO Arwing - Part 1

Okay so I recently have been really getting into LEGOs again. Like really getting into them. I've been building old sets I used to have as well as a bunch of sets I always wanted but never had the opportunity to get. We're talking sets from the year 2000 — vintage, collector's items that I've been plugging away at well into the early hours of the morning.

7191 X-Wing Starfighter (valued at $800+ in the original box)

But how am I affording all of these stupidly expensive toys on my modest (see nonexistent) budget?

Simple. I discovered the freely-distributed LEGO Digital Designer.

I can download pretty much any LEGO instruction booklet ever made from their official website. Then, using LDD, I can build it out on the computer.

Yes, yes I know. It's not the same as building in real life. Sure, I can't feel the tiny plastic parts in my hands as I meticulously snap them together, but I have personally found that building the sets on LDD provides me with a similar zen experience as if I were building in real life. That, mixed with the fact that I can choose nearly every LEGO brick ever made (in any color ever offered), makes the tradeoff worth it.

So anyway, after reliving a few sets I hadn't built since I was 12 and building a few sets I had only ever dreamed of owning, I began to set my sights on the next phase of using LDD — building an original model.

There is one thing that I have always dreamed of owning a LEGO version of and, in my youth, that I futilely attempted to recreate with my woefully insufficient LEGO collection. It was the marriage of two passions that were at full steam simultaneously: LEGOs and the Nintendo 64. Now, of all the games I played during that era (Super Mario 64, Shadows of the Empire, Pilotwings 64, Goldeneye, etc.) only one honestly compelled me to emulate it through pegged plastic — Starfox 64.

I truly don't know what it was that was so captivating about the polygon-tastic Arwing, Landmaster, Blue Marine, etc. from the game, but I have vivid memories of trying (and in my own mind succeeding) to recreate them. However, I have never had a sense of closure in my desire. The models that resulted in this era of my creation were simply placeholders for the model I wanted to own. They were sufficient only because my imagination allowed them to be.

But now, with an unlimited arsenal of LEGOs at my disposal, I'm ready to tackle it again — once and for all.

So where to begin?

Note my strikingly-accurate minifigures.

I tried to jump in headfirst last night. I built something that resembled the general body of the Arwing, but quickly began realizing that my scale might not be entirely accurate. So I decided to take a step back and actually begin at square one instead of just going for it.

Step one: locate a source of reference.

I started with the Starfox wiki. There, I learned that the canonical Arwing has a height of 17.5 space meters and a width of 8.5 space meters. That, of course, makes no sense. Fictional units of measurement aside, the image provided on the page doesn't fit these specs by a long shot. Even if we assume that "height" means "length", there's no way to know what they're measuring since the wings aren't stationary. Not to mention the different perspectives of the blueprint don't even match up.

Useless.

So, after Googling "arwing blueprints", I found this beauty:

Not only does it contain LOGICAL measurement data, but it is also a blueprint for the N64 Arwing specifically (yes, it does change significantly between games). I mean look at it, it even gives the wings' range of motion. Sweet.

Step two: gain perspective.

So, now for a little math. I have to find a way to relate the measurements I found for the Arwing with the LEGO brick size. So, assuming that a "space meter" is equal to one regular meter, I need to find out if there is some sort of standard convention for what a meter might be relative to a LEGO minifigure.

After about fifteen seconds of Googling, I found a LEGO scale conversion site. I noticed that on the right under "common scales" it says "Use 3 studs = 1 meter".

Question answered.

So, now I have to find a way to visually relay the relative size of the Arwing to a LEGO grid. This will be probably THE most useful tool I could utilize while crafting the ship. Getting my proportions correct will mean that there is little to no way of me screwing up the final look.

To do this, I'm going to use Photoshop. I'll open up the blueprints and crop out the top view of the Arwing. I'll get my crop lines as close as I can to the points being measured in the blueprint itself.

Now that I have this single graphic isolated, I can screw with the image size to make it into a resolution that will make sense later. What does this mean? I'll be verbose from here on.

First of all you have to understand the unit PPI. PPI means "pixels per inch". It measures the total amount of pixels within one square inch. That's all you really need to know about that.

So our cropped Arwing image is 303 pixels wide and 357 pixels high with a PPI of 72.

It'd be useful if, in our final graphic, each inch of the image were equal to one "space meter". That would, beyond anything else, just make it easier to look at.

Right now, our PPI is 72. We could just roll with that, but it's a pretty arbitrary number. It might be smarter for us to use a more rounded number so that our final pixel dimensions will also be rounded. That will allow us to spot errors more easily since we can assume that all pixel dimensions will be nice and pretty.

I was able to get a graphic of a LEGO brick from LDD. The dimensions of this image were right around 300px square so I just resized it to 300px by 300px.

Now, here's the math.

We know that one "space meter" is equal to three studs. We know that two studs is equal to 300 pixels. So, we can deduce that three studs will be equal to 450 pixels. Since we want our Arwing graphic to have each inch representing one "space meter", we can assume that inch inch of the graphic will be equal to 450 pixels since (as we just concluded) one "space meter" is equal to 450 pixels.

So now back to our Arwing graphic.

We can adjust the size of the image to have a PPI of 450 and then we can specify the size to have a height of 18.5 inches (equitable to the 18.5 "space meters" specified in the blueprint).

But wait! When we do that, the width is only 15.702 inches, not the 16 that the blueprint said!

Yeah, that's because it's not a real blueprint. After I uncheck "constrain proportions", I can specify the 16 inches and we're good to go. Photoshop will stretch the Arwing to become what the blueprint claims it is.

So, now we have our Arwing blueprint sized so that one square inch is equal to one square "space meter". We can now take our LEGO brick graphic and start tiling it over the Arwing.

To review, our LEGO brick graphic is 300 pixels by 300 pixels. We specified (on our Arwing graphic) that one square inch (one square "space meter") is equal to 450 pixels. Since our LEGO graphic is only two studs (and we need three to make a full "space meter"), 300 pixels makes sense since each stud would be worth 150 pixels. We can now successfully copy the LEGO graphic and paste it into the Arwing graphic and the LEGO image will accurately represent the size of a real LEGO brick as it would appear (relatively speaking) to the Arwing.

3 Studs = 450 Pixels = 1 "Space Meter"

After I overlayed the bricks, I realized that the blueprint wasn't entirely symmetrical. So, I copied the main fuselage and skewed it a bit to fit the grid more accurately. I then threw in some guides and created paths for the fuselage and the cockpit. By the end, I should be able to throw away the original blueprint graphic and only have my in-program shapes.

Anyway, that's all for now. Got things to do in real life, but you can bet I'll be working on this some more. Next up are the engines!