Hi Michael

To some extent when modelling anything you have use a panel by panel approach. Why am I doing that ?

The answer lies here in your own statement
>It may require you to do things like subtle edits and visualizations of how pieces intersect before you get a good result.
It is pretty darn hard (impossible) to visualise what shape the canopy needs to be so that when the windscreen is booleaned from it that shape matches the look of the real thing or plans. Where it is far more logical to create the windscreen shape, get it to look right by tweaking curves and then create the canopy shape from there. Which as we have seen doesn't work. And yes this is also how I would do it with polys except this approach does work.

The other reason is that the plan view & side view shape of the cockpit opening and windscreen are known entities from the plans so I am trying to model up to those know entities. What are not know entities are all the subtle blends that lead to those items which can only be done by eyeballing the shapes from photos. The plans are not much help when it comes to the shape of all those blends.

>I mean you can clearly see that the overall form that I created there does not suffer from bunching or warping issues.
Yes, I can see that the way you have tackled the transition of the fin from the fuselage is a good approach much like polymodelling.
But trying to get the shaped pulled to match the airfoil shape of my fin would be almost impossible to do on a first attempt. Once I've trimmed it so I can see what cross section shape I have got, I can't change it ? I would have to undo, trim again, nope still not right, undo, tweak, trim, undo, tweak trim undo etc. Bit of nightmare for someone trying to model this thing accurately. Sure if you're modelling fantasy stuff, who cares what shape it is.

As I stated in Jasons Clarks thead, nurbs almost gives you the shape you want but without the ability to tweak those surfaces to get those surfaces looking right compared to your reference photos, the user is in for a lot of trial and error and a very frustrating time. But as you've said if it were possible to do this, all your joints would start springing apart.

So this all comes back to the wrong tool for the job at hand. Best to use nurbs for what it does best which is boolean operations of more mechanical type parts rather than the complex curvatures and blends associated with trying to accurately portray a real car or aircraft.

Michael
I feel we are both going around in circles. Your telling me how nurbs works and how I should model. If you feel your not getting through to me your wrong, I fully understand exactly what your saying. For the reasons I mentioned above (please read them carefully), I'm sorry that approach is beyond the average modeller or even the above average modeller who wants to model a car or aircaft accurately which is probably the reason there are so few Nurbs cars or aircraft that are accurate looking representations of the real thing. All this work being done with polys. I honestly wish this was not the case as I like the precision and speed of working with nurbs but unfortunately for projects like this trying to get nurbs to bend to the complex curvature of this aircraft is just too difficult and time consuming for the average modeller.

Aside from solving all the modelling problems, getting your nurbs model to good clean mesh ready for uvmapping and rendering is another whole set of problems.