Gamilon Exterminator Class Destroyer - Part 6 (DONE!)

I've made a PDO file available for download.  You'll need to download install the Pepakura Viewer app (http://tamasoft.co.jp/pepakura-en/) to be able to open and print the contents of the PDO file.

What's nice about this is that the Pepakura Viewer will show you which piece goes to what part of the model.

You can download the file over at the Sci-Fi sub-section of the Downloads section at http://www.papermodelers.com.  If you haven't done so, you'll need to register and be a member (it's completely free and it won't send you any SPAM and other crap) to be able to have access to the Downloads section.

Gamilon Exterminator Class Destroyer - Part 5

Done!

I didn't bother coloring the edges of the model nor did I bother making joining strips.

Another thing I didn't remove are the Pepakura folding lines.  There are plenty of areas in the model that have no fold reference points that I had to include the folding lines.   I sure wish Tamasoft would eventually enhance Pepakura to allow the drawing of just the end points of those folding lines.

I have absolutely no idea what scale this model is. :)  And yes, it's not the same scale as the EDF destroyer.

By the way, I completely forgot to mention where I got the schematics for this.  Sorry about that.
You'll find the schematics for this ship at http://www.shipschematics.net/.  Excellent site!  Anyway, if you check out the diagrams of this ship from that site, you'll notice that I also took some shortcuts to simplify the shape of the hull and make assembly easier.

But of course, there are still parts of that are an absolute P.I.T.A. to assemble.  The main fuselage mega-cannon pictured on top is one of them.  You'll need a lot of patience to assemble this part.

Other than the main cannon, the rest of the model is easy to make. 

I'll make the diagrams available soon.

Gamilon Exterminator Class Destroyer - Part 4

Done with the texturing and Pepakura unwrapping!

Unfortunately, time has run out for me... I'll have to wait till the next weekend to do the test build.

Gamilon Exterminator Class Destroyer - Part 3

Almost done with the texturing!

Gamilon Exterminator Class Destroyer - Part 2

Base texture / paint job done!
Now to work on the seam / outlines...

Gamilon Exterminator Class Destroyer - Part 1

Okay...before I resume work on the P.1106R, I'd like to revisit using patches doing the fuselage. 
My choice for this prototype is the Gamilon Exterminator Class Destroyer.

When I was a kid, one of my favorite anime show was StarBlazers (Uchuu Senkan Yamato).  Some months ago, I came across this very nice model of an EDF Destroyer. 

Here's how my build attempt turned out:

Very nice model.

Why not make a Gamilon counterpart for this one?

I started design by creating the general shape of the hull using patches:

Once satisfied, I let Metaseq generate the wireframe. 
After a couple of optimizations, here's what I ended up with:

Neat eh? 

I'm pretty much done with the UV mapping as well.  All I need to do is to finish making the textures, then Pepakura, then BUILD BUILD BUILD!

After that, I'll go back to the P.1106R!

Messerschmitt P.1106 R - Part 8

Been very busy lately... I could hardly find the time to get back to work on my test build.
The past two weekends, I was able to find some time to resume work.

Smoke started billowing once more from the smoke stacks of Eric Flugzeugwerk!

Anyway, long story short... I finally concluded that my design for this model is just too "unfun".  In the quest to produce a design that captures all the curves of the P.1106R, I got carried away and over engineered the fuselage.

Oh yes, it is buildable, as seen from my previous posts..but it was just not fun to build.

Hence I decided to cut my losses and start over.

But before I do so, I did my best to complete the wing and tail assembly.

So here it is... ver 1.0.

Stay tuned for ver 2.0!

Messerschmitt P.1106 R - Part 7

Okay, this is turning out to be a lot harder than I originally thought.
Nevertheless, I must continue this... :)

I got to finish the fuselage today:

Now to work on those wings!

Messerschmitt P.1106 R - Part 6

A little progress here....   I was able to steal a couple of hours to resume work on the test build.

Last month I stopped at completing the inner formers for the fuselage.

Now, it's time to wrap the outer skin of the fuselage onto the formers.  So far, the only "wrapping" I've ever done was for wings, elevators and rudders.  This would be the first time for me to build a fuselage by wrapping the skin onto the formers.

Here's how I got started:

So far so good!  The outer skin fit perfectly.  I then proceeded adding the front segment.  The fit is still good!

At this time, I had already consumed 3 whole hours just by cutting the segments and creating the joining strips....  how time flies.. :(

Before I knew it, it was already evening and I had to call it a day.  At least I got to cover all the wheel wells.

Even without the last few fuselage segments, it's already looking like a P.1106R. :)

Messerschmitt P.1106 R - Part 5

It's been a very busy Q1 for 2011.  I've been in an out of the country since January, and I hardly have sufficient time to engage in card modeling.

Last February, I managed to get a rare free weekend to get back into action with my P.1106.

In my last post, I've only finished working on the fuselage formers.  I've yet to resume working on the wing and tail formers.  Not in the mood for 3d modeling at that time, I decided to start printing out the Pepakura unroll and start assembling just the fuselage...

BIG mistake.

Just look at these hideous pictures:

Notice how those fuselage formers seem to want to pop out the seams?  Well, when I was working on BV P.212, I surprisingly didn't experience any problems with the formers.  I made the formers of my BV P.212 by downsizing each fuselage segment by around 4%.  The fit was pretty good. 

SO I tried the same with my P.1106.  A lot of good it did me.

Another issue I had was with the wheel wells:

Blech!  I kinda experienced the same problem with the Heinkel and BV... I guess I never learned.  The bad fit of the wheel well was caused by the fuselage former pushing back the front walls of the wheel well.
At this point, I gave up.  I needed to stop what I was doing before wasting more time.

I had to resize those formers and solve the wheel well problem.

Not wanting to resort to trial and error, I decided to see how Metaseq's units relate with the actual scale outputted by Pepakura.

I created a cube primitive and set its size to 100x100x100.

I then imported the file to Pepakura.  I then set the Scale Factor of the model to 1.0 (1:1).  To my pleasant surprise, Pepakura reported that the length of the model is 100mm.  So I guess that means 1 unit in Metaseq is equivalent to 1mm in Pepakura.

So I created a kind of ruler objet in my P.1106 model and unfolded it in Pepakura:

Looks good!  Looks right! :)

So now, using my virtual ruler, I shrunk my formers by 1mm around the edges.  That should make up for the added bulk caused by the joining strips:

Now, to take care of that wheel well problem.  For this I decided to leverage the fuselage formers by getting rid of a wheel well's side/face if that wheel well's face touches a fomer.  To simplify the wheel wells even more, I introduced a set of lateral formers that would also double as the top walls of the wheel wells:

Those lateral formers would also serve to align the formers properly.

Assuming the formers are .75mm thick, I set the size of the slots to 1mm using my virtual ruler. Here's how the former assembly turned out.  Very promising!  The slots on the formers fit so well I didn't even have to use glue to hold them together.

I guess that would also require me to change the assembly strategy to wrapping/skinning the formers instead of individually assembling each section and joining them.  Gee I hope this measuring thing works!

That's all for now. :)

Messerschmitt P.1106 R - Part 4

I've finished making the fuselage formers.
I'm not sure if I overdid it though.  If it turns out to be overkill during the test build, I'll remove some of them.

Metasequoia's Boolean plugin

I'm going talk a bit about Metasequoia's Boolean plugin.

Before you continue reading, please note that the plug-in function is only available to registered copies of Metasequoia.  If you have the LE or the unregistered Shareware version, you won't be able to use the Boolean plugin.

Okay, let's start.

First things first, the boolean plugin is not UNICODE compliant.  This means that even if you've got East Asian language support installed in your OS, you will still see garbage characters when you run the plugin.  The only way to properly 'see' the Kanji characters on this plugin is to configure your OS to treat non-Unicode characters as SJIS.  Assuming you do this configuration correctly, here's how the Boolean dialog box should look like:

Lots of options!  But for this tutorial, you should only pay attention to the three combo boxes.  The left and right most combo boxes are the operands.  These combo boxes will be populated by the objects you've defined in Metasequoia.  The middle combo box is the operator.  This contains the boolean operations that you can perform.

The "OK" button starts the boolean operation.  (By the way, the "OK" button should be legible even if you're running an English only OS.)
The button to the right of the "OK" button is the Cancel button.  On English OS'es, this appears as "??????".

The bottom left most button ("?") brings up the help dialog box.  On English OS'es, you'll get a dialog box with garbage characters.  But if you did the configuration I mentioned earlier, here's what you'll get:

Again, lots of options!  If I have the time, maybe I'll pull out my Kanji dictionary and try to translate all of them.  (Sigh... if only the text on that dialog box were selectable, I could have run them through Google translate...)

Anyway, the options you should pay attention to are the following:

These are the options that will be available in the Operations combo box that I identified earlier.  I labeled the options with numbers so you'll know what entry they are in the Operations combo box, since they'll be illegible when running in English mode.

Now, let's run through each operation.

For my example, I'll be using the following objects:

In the screenshot above, I defined two objects, namely "Red" and "Blue".


1. UNION (Red + Blue)
This is the 1st option in the Operations combo box.
The Union operation creates a new object by joining objects Red and Blue.   The name of the new object will be "Red+Blue".

Here's how the results look like:

I intentionally hid the surfaces so you can see how the two objects are joined.

2. SUBTRACT (Red - Blue)
This is the 2nd option in the Operations combo box.
The Subtract operation carves out from Red the area occupied by Blue.   The name of the new object will be "Red-Blue".

Here's how the result looks like:

3. NOT ( Red ! Blue )
This is the 3rd option in the Operations combo box.
This operation is almost similar to the Subtract operation.  Basically, it performs a Union of Red and Blue.  Afterwards, it removes the surfaces of Blue.   The name of the new object will be "Red!Blue".

Here's the result:

Note that unlike the Subtract operation, this operation does not patch up surfaces removed.

4. AND ( Red & Blue )
This is the 4th option in the Operations combo box.
This operation creates a new object that contains the area where Red intersects with Blue.  The name of the new object will be "Red&Blue".  However, since the Windows UI treats the "&" character as a menu accelerator, the object name will appear as "RedBlue" in the object list.

Here's the result:

5. INTERSECT ( Red # Blue )
This is the 5th option in the Operations combo box.
This operation marks out in Red where the surfaces of Blue intersects with it.  The name of the new object will be "Red#Blue".

To better illustrate, here's the result:

6. ???? (????)
This is the 6th option.  This option is bugged.  Calling this option produces the same results as INTERSECT, but the name of the object is based on the AND operation... weird...

In other words, if I do a Red % Blue, I'll get a new object that looks like the result of Red # Blue, but is named as "RedBlue".

7. ASTERISK ( A * B )
This is the 7th option in the Operations combo box.
This is an interesting operation which I've yet to find something useful for. :)

What this does is it creates a new object where object A replaces every node that object B has.

To illustrate, I start with the following:

The sphere is Obj1, while the cube is Obj2.

After performing the operation, here's the result:

Interesting eh?  But again, for the purpose of Card Model creation, I've yet to find any useful applications for this operation.

8. DOUBLE ASTERISK ( A : B )
Hahahah.. okay... the word, "COLON" just doesn't sound pleasant.  So let's just use double asterisk.
This is the last option in the Operations combo box.

This basically does what the Asterisk operation does.  However, this does an extra step of "connecting" each node...er... just look at the example below.

Let's say we've got the following objects:

Obj1 is the red sphere, while Obj3 is the green shape.

After performing the operation, here's the result:

Ewww... what a mess!  Like its sibling, the Asterisk operation, this is really useless for Card Modeling.
It might be useful if you want to make jackstones or a model of a Spathi Eluder ship from the StarCon2 game. :)


Finally, if you're a bit adventurous, you can check out the button at the upper left corner of the Boolean dialog box.  This allows you to manually enter a boolean like "C=Red+Blue".

Anyway, I hope you've found this short tutorial helpful.

Messerschmitt P.1106 R - Part 3

I'm done carving out the wheelwells.  Surprisingly, Metaseq's BOOLEAN plugin has been very cooperative.  It didn't produce a lot of unwanted artifacts like before.  Or maybe it's because I used more edges...

Here's how it looks like:

Like the BF109, the P.1106 has a narrow tracked set of landing gears.  It would have probably been hard to land safely with this configuration.

Anyway, we'll never know since this plane never got built.

Here's how it looks like from the side:

 Next task would be to work on those fuselage and wing formers!

Magnet Tool Revisited

I don't know if you've already figured this out...but I thought it might be worth documenting nonetheless...

Previously, I wrote a short tutorial on how to use Metaseq's magnet tool to create smooth wing (or fuselage) cross sections.

At that time, I was not aware of a particular parameter/field in the Magnet tool's dialog window which could have made the job a lot easier.  This field is called the Range field.  This field apparently controls the area of effect of the magnet tool.

To demonstrate, I start with the following cross section:

By default, the Range field of the magnet tool is set to 100.    If I use the default value on the cross section I created, this is what I get: 

If I adjust the Field value to "75", the effect of the magnet tool is lessened.  Notice how the magnet tool affects even the bottom nodes:

Now, if I adjust the Magnet tool's Range value to, say... "50",  the effect now looks a lot like what is sone on the magnet icon. :)  Also, the bottom nodes are no longer affected:

Bumping it down to "25" produces the following:

Here's how it looks like when you use the circular icon (2nd icon):

Here's what the 3rd icon's effect looks like:

Finally, here's what the last icon's effect looks like:

Now, let's revisit the wing cross section (chord) creation.

Start with an oval shape like the following:

Reduce the magnet tool's Range field to around "90".  (Or less, depending on how you created your oval shape.)  Select the 2nd icon (the round shape).  Now, slighty flatten the bottom part of the oval so that it looks like the following picture:

Now, use the 3rd icon and pull out the right end of the oval to produce the tail end of the cross section. 

With a bit of experimentation, you can tweak the Range field of the magnet tool to produce irregular shaped fuselage cross like the one I used for the Messerschmitt P.1106 R:

Cheers!