Hi Michael,

I normally do ships, but now I am stuck with a bunch of warplane masters to deliver. Airplanes are more organic in nature than ships. I have bumped into NURBS limitations much more now than ever before, although generating complex modern hulls for warships is sometimes a challenge too. I would really like to avoid having to go into Zbrush territory, but I can see that MoI (or Rhino for those stunts that MoI does not yet do) can be a good first step. It has to be much less painful to generate the overall shapes of an airplane using NURBS than with a sub-d approach, although the MilitaryMesh.com community swears of the contrary, but they have mastered 3DMax and the like long ago.

I’d like to stick to a MoI only workflow also because the STL guys want 3dm files only. They seem religious about that, for some reason.

Thanks a lot for your input anyway.

Jean-Paul

Hi Jean-Paul, I wouldn't say that sub-d is "easy" at all, really - it definitely takes plenty time and practice to get accustomed to how its toolset works.

But the overall mechanism for how sub-d works tends to work better for sculpting or deforming localized areas of a shape.

You do end up dealing with a lot of points in sub-d since you basically do your work on a 3D point cage all the time. That's also one reason why it can take some time to refine the techniques, because you have to use various tools to help you manage and manipulate a larger number of points to work with.

But it does have a lot more freedom to kind of add a ring of additional points in one area, inflate some points to make a bulge, etc...


NURBS on the other hand tends to work best when the shapes involved are well defined by a set of profile curves. When that's the case then NURBS can build the shape much more accurately and also much more quickly than trying to manipulate a big bunch of points.

But as you get more into shapes with bumps in them and things like cloth, faces, etc... those kinds of shapes become more difficult to define clearly by using only a few profile curves.

That's kind of the territory that you're getting into with this one.


- Michael

I think the key is that the ribs are actually the intended shape and the canvas deflects/sags down into the valleys of the span due to gravity and downward force from the laminar flow in flight stretching the canvas.

See if this helps

Thats very cool stuff grendel.

Interesting how that point back tracking on each other works. That was not in my toolset but is now!

Thanks again.

No problem, kind of a Sub-D aproach to it.

Hi Grendel
The Canvas is actually layed out over the wing and sewn together at trailing etch and wingtip. then
painted with something called "dope". That makes the canvas shrink and the ribs stick out.
Hope that helps.
Andy

I thought that last one from grendel pretty much nailed it!

Indeed. I believe that Grendel's suggestion does it. Well done, gang ! And thanks a lot. Your help is much appreciated.

Jean-Paul

Andy - That makes sense..you would want some sort of waterproofing to prevent the wings from retaining water and some way of pulling it taut over the frame.

Grendel - that dope or, taughtning dope, as they called it did all that. Some celluloses based compound.
Awfully smelling stuff. That why the name.
Andy