Hi, welcome to the forum and to MoI!
An airplane is one of the more difficult and advanced projects that you could really try to do in a CAD program, it may be awkward for you to start out initially with such an difficult level of project rather than doing something like mechanical parts to get familiar with things to start with... Just something to be aware of. The more that your design uses organic flowing shapes the more it can be better suited for creating in a sub-d modeling program rather than in a profile curve driven CAD program like MoI.
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There are a few things I'm not sure how to 'fix' after a curve has been drawn. For example, say i wanted to adjust the roof of the fuselage cockpit area and give it a slight arc like in the references after i've created the initial curves and still keep the center point/curves tangent to the center line? or adjust curve points and make them tangent after the initial curve has been drawn?
You'd turn on the control points for your curves, and edit those points to move the appropriate ones upwards, keeping the last 2 ending points of the curve to be in a horizontal line to control the end tangent direction.
If you want to make adjustments it can help to try and use a smaller number of curves rather than a lot of curves.
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Question 2:
I'm not sure if i'm going about cutting the curves into the fuselage to separate the surface is the 'right' way. after i create curves from the right orthographic view, i project the curves onto the surface that i will intersect with the surface to make a separate surface for the windows. first, i'm not sure if this is the 'right' way to do this, and secondly, the curves are not being projected completely onto the surface...the bottom pieces on the back windows are not projected. i have checked the original curve to make sure all the joints are actually connected. so i'm guessing it may have something to do with the surface edge that is conflicting with the projected curve, since they appear to be either in the same spot or close to it. any advice?
For answering this question it would help a lot if you could post the 3DM model file in it with your geometry, so I could inspect it and try to repeat the trim over here and see what's going on. It's a lot easier to analyze the actual geometry than it is just a screenshot. One general note though, you don't need to project curves onto the surface as a separate step, you can just cut using the 2D curves directly and let Trim handle the projection for you, which is the preferred way.
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Let's say I figure out how to resolve questions 1 & 2 above, what is the best approach to think about bevels? should i think about them before i project any curves and do a copy/offset on them first, then project? or can i do a bevel later once i get my base created for things to then work on beveling things that need beveling?
Well it depends on what particular pieces you are going to be beveling. For a complex shape like you've working on there you will probably be looking at using the Construct > Blend command to put in smooth connecting pieces between things rather than the Fillet command though.
If you can post your 3DM I can give you some better information probably...
- Michael
