Incredible Cross Sections: Airliner

dolphus

WAY TO GO Liam ....real cool will follow you with great interest and admiration

liam887

Wow, very cool Liam, this is going to put a strain on the system Are you going to model different large sections and then bring the model together in the final presentation?

Unfortunately James thats what im already having to do. I knew it wouldn't be long before I had slowdown and color wheel of death so I planned ahead.

Basically the whole aircraft is made up of many different components. Each one is in a different file from small to big, even windows and doors have their own files. This allows me to work extremely fast, I started this model yesterday evening and its now only 2pm, I suppose the best way of thinking of it is that its Lego ive just made my own pieces and it takes minutes to assemble a new section.

I then have a master template file which is half of a ring section,
I then customize this ring section to my needs adding different parts such as windows and doors and also deleting parts and then pasting in the structural parts giving the cross section look. I then save it as a section file for example "Nose Section", "Main Undercarriage" etc.

When I do large renders I paste the section files together and export to kerk (takes a good 4 mins to load in kerk). Its annoying as in other programs its so easy to navigate the model, but thats always ben one of sketchups low points, cant be helped right now and it doesn't bother me too much.

Ive got another render in the oven probably be at least an hour but here is the raw SU image of the coming render:

Note: the wings engines etc are all placeholders I just have them to scale up the aircraft don't worry they will get the same treatment as the fuselage as i move on.

full modelSU raw.jpg

Rich O Brien

What's your source material? So far I'm highly impressed it really is taking shape fast.

liam887

Just my head really and obv when im doing certain things like windows and doors ill use photographs to try and get the shape right. But im a big plane buff from when I was very young, I was actually doing my private pilots license out of Liverpool Flying School, i got far enough to take off fly for an hour and land myself (dual controls however never been solo) until I ran out of money haha. Maybe when I finish Uni and get a real job I will continue. I know where all the bits and bobs are supposed to go and what they are supposed to do as long as I get the important bits in should be ok.
Ive also got these big manuals from my uncle called warplane, ive got 9 volumes and each one has hundreds of full pull out spreads of military cross sectioned aircraft, ive read them from when I was little (they are from the late 80's early 90's) so I know how these things are put together. Of course with this aircraft its all about looks rather than technical accuracy lol.

Redirect Notice

(www.google.co.uk)

This isnt going to be a real design more of a mish mash, its obv in the future but only maybe 10 years+.

liam887

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olishea

This is pretty impressive stuff!! Liam have you tried using Twilight instead of exporting/importing to KT? there is a free trial version, limited res etc.

liam887

@olishea said:

This is pretty impressive stuff!! Liam have you tried using Twilight instead of exporting/importing to KT? there is a free trial version, limited res etc.

I would but its windows only as far as I know and im on my mac

olishea

@liam887 said:

I would but its windows only as far as I know and im on my mac

I'm on a mac too!! Get vmware fusion or use bootcamp to run windows. with vmware you can instantly switch between windows/mac....its just like opening another application, all your files are instantly mirrored as well. with vmware just boot windows from a disk image. its soooooo easy.

look at my screengrab (yes my desktop's messy lol). windows running at same time. If you buy windows version the license is transferable to mac version when it comes out, sorry i don't work for twilight or anything, im just preempting a question haha

liam887

lol ive got xp on bootcamp dont worry im just lazy I hate swapping as my itunes is only on my mac partition to save space (XP Partition only 30GB), I only use it for 3dsmax and games but now that SU just cant handle the model when exporting it kerk I guess ive got no choice lol. Ive downloaded the demo ill install it laster and hopefully have a render soon!!

liam887

Well I had to remove all of the chairs and although it doesnt look it I went back and remade each section cutting out as many polys as I could wihtout spending too much time on the model.
Started work on the back engine intake.

GoldenFrog

Amazing work. It's almost unbeleivable that this is a sketchup model. Your really pushing SU to the extreme.

liam887

thanks, well lets hope not hey ive got too much still to go before my computer is allowed to implode.

GoldenFrog

Lol, by now, it's entitled to do so!

liam887

No ill be fine for a while, the file now is at 40MB be able to get up to 100MB before I start experiencing problems.

liam887

Reworking the aircraft, added some new engines, going to scrap the wings and nose and go concord on this bad boy. Some sort of hybrid engines are added now, ignore the material I was just playing around!

liam887

well the kerk file has no risen to 480MB (46MB in SU) my little macbook pro is having problems editing it in SU so im taking it to a maters house and installing it on his overclocked mega PC hopefully ill be able to get some faster renders from that wish me luck!!!!