Wednesday, January 2, 2013

Focke-Wulf VTOL - Part 5

Now on to the rudder!

Design Goal

For the rudder, I want to create a wireframe that will produce a cardboard model that looks somewhat like the image above.

This will be an experiment for me so I'm not sure if this will work out.   If it does work out, I'll be using this for making the wingtips of my future models.

Time to whip out the knife tool again!

Initial Steps


I start by freezing the low poly model to produce the wireframe above.

As always, there's a need to reduce the number of edges, courtesy of the Knife Tool.

Making the Petals


Using the Knife Tool, I've made some small slices on the edges of the rudder.  These will be the "petals".

Then, using manual vertex joins, I produced the image above.  Looks good so far.

Here's a picture of the progress.

I'm not happy with the vertical slice shown above.  I'll be using the knife tool to angle the slice a bit.  This will make the card model assembly easier later on.

Much better!

Joining the Rudder to the Fuselage

To join the rudder to the fuselage, I plan to make something similar to the cockpit-rudder joint.



Nothing special here.  Just a bunch of Boolean intersects and cleanups.

That's basically it for the rudder.

Next I'll start working on the engine.




Tuesday, January 1, 2013

Focke-Wulf VTOL - Part 4


Now to work on the cockpit!

Design Objective


The picture above shows how I want the Cockpit to mate with the fuselage.  This should allow the cockpit to align properly with the fuselage.

Making the Cut

 

Preparations...

To achieve the design objective, I start by performing two Boolean operations.


First, I get the intersection of the cockpit with the fuselage. (Fuselage = Fuselage # Cockpit)


Again, it's a mess!  The picture above shows the resulting intersect operation after cleanup.


Now, I get the intersection of the fuselage with the cockpit. (Cockpit = Cockpit # Fuselage)


And here's how it looks like after cleaning up the mess that the Boolean operation left behind.

Removing the Unwanted Faces/Surfaces

With the Boolean outline cleaned up, it's time to delete the parts of the Cockpit and the Fuselage to allow both parts to mate.

Here's how the fuselage looks like.


And here's how the cockpit looks like.



 
Finally, here's how the model looks so far.