Hi anthony,

> The only problem I'm having right now is figuring out what
> causes bad surfaces or bad visualizations to occur.

But keep in mind that the problem of a little bit of polygonal looking silhouette in the visualization is a normal part of the realtime viewport display mechanism and is not something that you should actively work on avoiding.

- Michael

Hi Michael,

I believe my problem is stemming from the following, based on my recent tests. It seems I have to increase the trailing edge radius (ter) by a factor of 3 and break the circle up into four pieces. Doing these two things allows the sweep op to create the desired geometry. If I don't scale the ter at all then I get very random results. If I scale the ter by 2.5, MoI will create geometry in a repeatable fashion. However, not the geometry it does when the ter is scaled up by 3.

Once I got a handle on everything, all that you have to do is select the circle, select the airfoil and do a two rail sweep. If the ter is big enough and the circle is broke up into four pieces (presumably to match the four airfoil curve segments) then everything is accurate, repeatable, and displays properly. Rebuild and mesh size had some affect, but not really anything related to my problems.

On a different note:

I realized that having the variable pitch blade shank on the swept blade does not make sense in reality. I was doing it just to kick the tires on MoI. But for the sake of reducing confusion I put my novel fixed pitch blade attachment on the swept blade and the traditional variable pitch attachment on the straight blades. The swept design is for the Airbus A400M military transport and the straight blades are for the Piaggio Avanti II business turboprop. Both very cool planes.

Thanks to everyone for your help, I believe I have everything under control now. I'm going to remove all the old pics I attached to save server space. As always these pics are also on the PROP_DESIGN website.

And just to summarize this thread; basically the answer was not to use blend, use sweep instead.

I created a screencast showing how I made the Airbus A400M model. I plan on adding one for the Piaggio Avanti II as well. The screencast can be found here:

http://www.youtube.com/user/propdesignsupport

It's about 15 minute long and there is no sound. In this case I scaled the ter by 2.5 and rebuilt the ter and the rails. This prevented downstream errors that would occur. Scaling the ter alone did not fix the problem. The rebuild was necessary.

Cool video !

Thanks Pilou,

I was rushing to finish within 15 minutes. Having been modelling these all day long I was a little bleary eyed as well, lol. The more I work with these the more it looks like rebuilding the ter may be the key. I will have to try it with the actual ter, no scaling, but rebuild it. It looks like breaking the circle in four pieces and rebuilding it with 25 points is the trick. It doesn't seem like rebuilding the rails does anything. The sweep seems to have some of its own logic that we don't have access too. But that doesn't seem to be much of an issue.

I know that rebuilding the whole airfoil is a disaster. Basically I just keep ruling things out. I'm getting very close to the culprit of my repeatability woes.

I played around with things some more and found that the variability is coming from the ter rebuild and the ter size. One model I don't have to scale the ter up to get the desired results, however, I have to rebuild it with more points. In another model I have to scale it up and rebuild it. To complicate things more how many points you add in the rebuild affects things. Given all the different combinations of possible things going on, there is going to be a lot of variability, no way around it.

Found the problem. I tried rebuilding the suction and pressure side curves as well as the trailing edge radius (ter). I added roughly double the points to each and everything worked. I will update the screencasts on my youtube page in the coming days.

Update; Unfortunately, the above did not entirely fix the problems. Later on operations failed to create good geo. So I'm still going to have to play around and see what exactly causes so much variability.

I found the problem. If I rebuild most of the lines, arcs, and circles used throughout the entire modelling process everything works fine. I did not need to scale the ter up at all.

Latest pictures are available at; http://propdesign.weebly.com/screenshots.html

Latest screencasts are available at; http://www.youtube.com/user/propdesignsupport/