Fairings
-
I haven't found any good illustrations of how one might make wing fairings, the dished surfaces that that join an aircraft wing to the fuselage. If there are any aviation enthusiasts that have found some solutions to this challenge, I will appreciate any kind of pointers. Thanks.
- Mike
-
Hi Mike,
This tool set from TIG should make life easy!Are you familiar with installing plugins? If not read TIG's advice on where to put this. There are 7 extrude tools in this plugin so there is also 7 topics concerning each in the plugin forum.
If you've any hassle post back.
Rich
Which Aircraft are the Wing to Body's for?
-
Thanks; I'll take a closer look at those plugins. I have used the extrude edges by rails to make a nice cowling. I haven't really figured out the rest yet, and I also want to get some idea about the stage at which I should be applying the tools for this issue so I don't get bogged down with undoing.
I am about to extrude the wing for a Nakajima Ki 43, Oscar. My previous effort was with a WWI biplane, which I chose specifically because it didn't have fairings. If I want to do anything more modern, though, I'm going to have to learn to make them. My goal is not so much photo-realism as it is to produce something that looks like it might actually fly.
-
Believe me, fairings will take about as long to do as the airplane itself.
I do use the arc tool a lot, but with reduced sides. Then I triangulate each side to form the fairing faces. The triangulation needs to be consistently done, and avoid hubs or spiders where possible. Expect that many triangles will have to be done over from opposing corners, or even split up into smaller triangles to get a smoother surface.
SU does not always form a face when you make a triangle. You have to be very careful and draw lines from endpoints only. If a face still refuses to form, delete all 3 lines and do it over. And, as an added irritation, face reversal happens often.
Then you have to tweak the fairings at many of the intersections with the copy/move tool, working one axis at a time, with constant rotation and pan/zoom to eye the smoothness.
Make all the lines soft/smooth (entity info or ctrl+eraser tool). Avoid hidden lines, except at edges that fair into other surfaces. Keep hidden lines visible at all times except to check the job overall.
Plan to spend some tedious time doing a fair job. (pun intended)
-
Thanks for that response. I was hoping for something in the way of an elegant shortcut, but at least it is good to have some place to start.
Advertisement