 WELCOME
TO PART TWO OF THIS TUTORIAL SERIES
In PART ONE - THE ENGINE, I demonstrated
the modeling of the rotary engine for this airplane. In PART TWO, I will
show some of the techniques used to model the actual fuselage.
The Sopwith Pup, like many other aircraft of its generation, was
constructed of fabric stretched over a wooden frame - resulting in a very strong
and light structure (though it was obviously not bullet or fire proof)
Since I intend to use this model in some fairly high end renderings, where some
backlighting may be used, I want the translucency of the real aircraft to be
captured in the model. To this end, I intend to model all the internal wooden
frame, even though it would not be necessary if I did not want the internal
shadows to be visible.
Check for the textures I used at the end of this
tutorial.
PART TWO - FUSELAGE
STEP ONE - SETTING THE STAGE
 To
ensure that our Sopwith Pup is modeled to proper scale, I use blueprints. In
your Max file, set up 3 planes, along each of the major axis, and texture these
planes with the corresponding angle from the plans. (download
Max9 file and textures here)
Above these three plan displays, I also added a set of cross-sections, which are
useful for keeping the fuselage sections in scale (SCREENSHOT).
It is very important that the 3 sets of plans all
be scaled the exact same amount, or problems will arise later that may make for
a lot of extra work to fix.
I set up the plans so that the center line of the aircraft coincides with the
center of the file's coordinate system (the center of the main grid). This
simplifies the math quite a bit, and also means that you really need model only
one side of the aircraft (the other side can be "mirrored")
This model was created using
Autodesk 3ds Max 9® 3D
modeling, animation, and rendering software.
In
future tutorials I will also be using Vue 6 xStream for rendering the
flying environment.
We're ready to start modeling, so let's
begin >>>
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