Once you let the paint dry you can even add in some extra details like bullet holes or burn marks.

If you are unsure of this process take a failed part or print a part twice to experiment with different techniques.

This leaves the paint in the deeper grooves and removes it off the higher surfaces and this gives a good dirty look to it. What you do is you take very watered down paint, mash it over the surface, and then wipe it with a paper towel. Since we want the model to look worn and like it had been in battle, this process is perfect. Painting this model was an easy and the fun part of the project. Some of the parts (especially the tips of the wings) would be extremely fragile if there wasn’t a rod to support it. This is so we could drive plastic rods in the model to give it strength. While building the model in SOLIDWORKS, we made a few holes on all the bodies. This is especially true for the long ones as a failure could damage your machine or waste your time if it’s a 15 hour print and it fails in the first 20 minutes. This is a good example on why you should always monitor your prints. We had a little failure due to over extrusion, but all we had to do to correct this was relaunch and it came out perfect the second time. The printing for this went almost flawlessly. We saved them as separate STL formats and printed them off. Once the model was completed and we were happy we split the files. There is nothing worse than spending hours on detail that doesn’t show out in the end. We would suggest test printing a part to see if the chamfers are deep enough to show in the 3D print. This gave an awesome paneled look on the surface. We then applied chamfers on all the edges and merged the bodies back together. We used these surfaces to split the model up. To create all the little panels along the side of the X-Wing, we sketched out the pattern then extruded a surface. We were super excited when we noticed the wing only had to be done once and mirrored to create the other 3. The less time you spend on modelling, the more time you can spend on snacks. When making models like these in SOLIDWORKS, use any ‘cheats’ you can in order to speed up the build time. As the body is mostly symmetrical,we only needed to focus detail on one half. We used some simple lofted shapes and edited the sketches until we were happy with the overall shape of the body. This iconic rebel ship may look simple, but the shapes that flow into each other can be a little tricky.

How to draw an x wing fighter