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Old 14th October 2010, 12:01 PM   #11
Stiglr
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Default Re: Aircraft prop blades

For wings I try to get a cross section of the airfoil. This I extrude and "thin" all the way out to the tip, taking care to segment for easy isolation of flap and aileron cutouts as I go. This normally creates one inner wing, one center wing, and an outer wing.

On the fuselage join end, I'll usually describe the join area on the fuselage with vertices, and cut it out to make a hole. Then, manually create the faces between the join area and the inner wing. If there's a scallop between the fuselage weld and the inner wing, I may need to do a Knife cut or two and drag/scale the rows of vertices to fit, using the front (head-on) view as a guide.

On the wingtip end, I use an odd method, but it seems to work for me, better than trying to simply round off a airfoil shape:

After extruding the wing all the way to the start of the rounded tip, I first draw an outline of the tip in Top View using the Line tool (not a poly). This I copy and paste directly below the original outline, then position and rotate both outlines to create the proper taper of the wingtip. I Merge the outlines and the outer wing into one object, weld the tips' innermost vertices to the closest corresponding vertice on the open ends of the outer wing, then manually create the top, side and bottom faces of the wingtip, one at a time, taking care to create the faces by selecting vertices counterclockwise, so as not to create inward-looking faces. (you're usually well advised at some point to make the whole object one sided, so you can see any facing problems as you create them.)
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Old 20th October 2010, 04:09 AM   #12
Simon_Lister
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Default Re: Aircraft prop blades

Many thanks for all the tips and advice guys, much appreciated. This is a random question and it is something I have thought about for a while. The flight sim I use has a development package (and if you are clever enough to work out all the binaries and stuff you can get all the updates prior to a new version being released) unfortunately I am not that clever and the development package makes use of shaders and bump maps...so if I didn't want to use a bump map for the rivet effect, does anyone know if it is possible to somehow follow the contour of the fuse/wing etc and add spheres to create the rivets? I know this might bump up the file size quite a bit but its just something I have been thinking about.

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Old 20th October 2010, 12:33 PM   #13
Stiglr
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Default Re: Aircraft prop blades

I really, REALLY wouldn't go there. That's a headache you definitely don't want.

Bump mapping is the way to go. Perhaps what you need to do is find a production partner for whom creating such maps is easy (and fun).

If that's completely out of the question, I'd settle for high quality (flat) textures for rivets long before ever entertaining the notion of creating 3D rivets.
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