Help Needed With Windscreens

[Nav]

After years of just downloading the results of other people's hard work, I thought I'd finally try my hand at designing. After four days of wrong turnings I have a reasonable fuselage, wings, and tail and am moving on to detailing. But I've come to a full stop, and can't find the answer to the problem in any of the (otherwise excellent) tutes I'm following.

The first problem is selecting 'polygons' for the cabin windows. The tute I'm following tells me the theory - 'select' the outlines, save them separately, make them transparent, and merge them back in - but I keep falling at the first fence, because I can't work out how to use the 'Select' Tool.

I'm using FSDS and the select tool is a strange arrangement of 'arrow and box.' Whenever I put it anywhere near the window outlines and click/drag, it ignores the things I want it to outline and instead takes quite a big chunk from between the blue 'stringer' lines left over from the fuselage construction. That's no use to me because I wouldn't know where to locate the actual windows (which are small) without being able to refer to my (home-made) backdrop.

Second problem is one I can see looming - the aircraft I'm trying to model is a 1930s DH95 Flamingo, and it has a central pillar and a windscreen that is V-shaped in plan. I really don't know how I'm going to fashion that just by using the fuselage templates.

Any advice would be most welcome - other than 'life's too short, give the whole project up and have another beer,' I've given myself that advice often enough in the last few days!

[Brett_Henderson]

Man.. this really is a learn as you go process.. You almost need to develope a style of modeling that fits the way you see the project, and it's evolution.

The one thing that you'll need to master, is building polys one at a time; by adding points, deleting polys and creating new polys from selected points. It's time consuming and nerve-wracking.. But without GMAX's advanced shaping tools (like soft-select and uniform-select and scale), it's the best way (that I know of) for making your vision show up in form.

The best way for selecting polys, is to click on them (make sure you've hidden the 1/2, or any other part of the model you won't be working on at the time)... OR.. use the arrow keys and "shift+S"..

I never did like making a window by just selecting polys. Since you'll end up making a fuselage "thick walled" anyway; inclucing an edge around the window.. You might as well model the window holes as you go.. and then make the glass as a discrete part.

[Brett_Henderson]

For what it's worth.. Here's a crude representation of how I go about building polys, one at a time, for those intricate, "hard to shape" parts of a model..

[gryshnak]

First, congratulations on taking the plunge into designing!  Your first plane will probably take ages, and you won't be completely satisfied with the result.  But you'll learn so much from doing it that your next design will be much better, and ten times faster.

If you're selecting things other than the bits you want, go back to Part mode and select those other annoying bits first (cycle through them with the left/right arrow keys and select them with the space bar).

[Nav]

Thanks for the constructive replies, guys, they're helping. Though I must admit that it's like learning a foreign language without a dictionary - you keep coming across words (and techniques) that you just don't know.

Good idea about screenshots, gryshnak. The aeroplane I'm trying to do is the DH Flamingo, which would have been Britain's answer to the Dakota (it carried almost as much just as far, 40 knots faster) had De Havilland not had to stop producing it in 1938 and concentrate on the Mosquito as WW2 approached.



I've managed to get this far. I'm 75% satisfied with the fuselage (it has a 'rounded square' cross-section which helped me learn a bit about templates!). The wing needs further work - I need to start from scratch with the proper aerofoil section - and the tailplane is still in the formative stage, but coming along all right.



The only problem I still have is, how do I do rounded wingtips instead of square ones? Templates again?

Also, Brett, how do I 'add points'? This comes up under 'Edit', but only in Template Mode, it's greyed out in all other modes?

As far as I can work out, the ways forward look to be:-

1. Design the cockpit canopy as a separate 'box', complete with windows, and then save it as a Part and Merge it in.

2. Select/save the whole sections containing the door and cabin windows on each side as separate Parts, form all the openings (somehow), and again Merge them back in.

[Brett_Henderson]

You're so right when you say it's like learning a language without a dictionary. You literally have to work your way through stuff. A pointer here and a pointer there can help... but you have to remember that any one person's technique for solving a problem stems from how they got to the problem and how they "visualize" solving it. There are many ways to go about it.

Rounding wing-tips, from my perspective, can be done a couple of ways. You can make a sphere; delete all but some portion of it; flatten and shape

[Nav]

Thanks for your efforts, Brett, I'm making progress! I've got moving points taped now - after a delay while I realised that, besides selecting a given point, you have to select 'Translate/Move' before you move it.

Forget learning a language without a dictionary - once you get down to fiddling with individual points, it's more like painting a cathedral with a toothbrush.  :)

Rounded wingtips are 'under control' - I found that I can do them the way I did the rounded nose, lots of cross-sections close together. I've also got the hang of transparencies.  

On modelling the cockpit and cabin windows, that's now 'work in progress.' I think the answer is going to turn out to be yet more cross-sections, with double ones for the vertical pillars. Promising results so far, anyway.

In fact, that's maybe some advice I can offer to anyone reading this who is at an even earlier stage than me - there's a tendency at first to economise on cross-sections, on a sort of 'least said soonest mended' principle. Use plenty, especially in critical areas needing detailed design. Keep your original fuselage saved separately so you can always 'backtrack' if need be. And save your work in separate parts (left side,  right side, tail section, cabin section, wing etc.) rather than putting all your eggs in one basket.

Finding this useful too. At first I thought that he was making everything unnecessarily complicated. But I soon realised that he was actually keeping everything pretty simple, it's the actual WORK that's complicated.

http://www.abacuspub.com/ds/tutorial/FSDSTutorial1.htm

Thanks again, Brett.

[Ben252]

Nav,

Looking at your screen shot's I'd also have a read up about the use of smoothing groups.  This stops the trailing egdes of wings etc looking like a squashed ballon and enables you to produce a clean knife edge.

This phenomenon has now come to be known as Ito'esque.

Ben252