Feasible approach to modeling this part of an airplane?

#1

I’m trying to create the wing joint of this jet aircraft (where the wing base attaches to the fuselage) in 3ds Max. I’ve tried laying out splines and then applying a Surface modifier, I’ve tried bridging the mesh between the bottoms of the wings and modeling poly-by-poly, but none of these techniques are producing a satisfactory mesh. :sad: Most tutorials I’ve seen for this “area” of an aircraft recommend modeling the wing and fuselage in one object by extruding polygons, chamfering the edges, and then smoothing it all over–which is great–if you’re not trying to replicate 99% of a real aircraft in 3D with wings that have nearly FAA-accurate airfoils. :rolleyes:

The specific points on this object that I’m having trouble with are where it attaches tp the fuselage in the fore and aft, and also the weird little “hump” that begins in front of the airplane’s landing gear, which is most visible in the first image below. The fuselage is a 28-sided cylinder, extruded from a 6-step circle. The chamfering technique would most likely not work, since the fuselage remains a perfect cylinder except for the belly fairing. I’ve attached some pictures highlighting the troublesome area, which were the best ones I could find via Google.

What kind of technique would you experts recommend for achieving this strange shape?

Many thanks in advance. :thumbsup:

#2

The best approach to modeling the belly is to model it with subdivisions (lowpoly cage with turbosmooth modeifier applied). This will give you the best control over the general shape and will allow you to have a smooth ‘organic’ flow together with sharper areas in one mesh.
It’s not trivial to achieve an accurate result but it’s certainly possible and it’s the best way to get there in max.

#3

I actually did something like this with a P-51, and had to create super-realistic airfoil shapes. The area you’re referring to is technically referred to as the “wing fillet”, by the way.

My technique, as best I recall, was to model the fuselage and wing separately, keeping the detail as low as possible for easy workability.

Then I cut out (deleted faces) the fillet base, and cut out the center of the wing, leaving me with a fuselage with holes on either side and two shortened wings with no center. I then manually added edge loops and bridged the gaps between the two geometries. Then it was just a lot of manual poly-pushing to get the fillet to look right.

I created the wing by creating a box shape and shaping it to the airfoil as best I could by hand, then extruding it.

Conversely, you could use a tool like Rhino and create this area out of surfaces, then do a BlendSrf command. Then convert it to polygons and drop it into your modeler of choice.

Hope this helps! :slight_smile:

#4

Hi Pokoy, that method would surely work for the overall shape, but for the parts that come in contact with the fuselage and wings, there would be a lot of mesh irregularity. I think I’ve tried that method before, and the hardest part was connecting the wings smoothly. It’s strange how the top of the wing makes a sharp angle with the “belly fairing” and the leading edge kind of blends into the root. I might just try the poly-by-poly method, but the guesswork involved in making the edges perfectly match that cylinder can throw off the entire form, and also cause brain hemorrhages. :eek:

#5

:banghead: 4 more tries and still not a good result… :sad: I think I’m just going to delete the wing and use a spline for the base of it, then make a sort of “cage”, then surface it. However it’s going to be done, it’s going to be messy. :arteest:

#6

I’m not sure if my post went through or not. So basically, how I did this with a P-51 model a few years back was to build the fuselage and wings as seperate bodies, but intersecting. The wings I built via a box extrusion, pulling the points in sub-D mode to make the airfoil shape as close as I could to the actual one (which I got really damn close). I cut out the middle of the wing and cut out holes on either side of the fuselage. Then I used bridges and loop slices to stitch the model parts together.

Think of an airline body like a 12 sided tube. slice that tube from the sides, where you want the front and back of your fillets to end. If you had a four sided wing, you could bridge the large end of the wing to one face of that 12 sided tube.

Hope that helps?

The other option is you could take this into Rhino or Fusion 360, turn it into T-Splines, do an extrusion, and fillet the intersection. Or if you don’t want to use T-Splines, just build it from NURBs, do a surface fillet, then save it back out as a poly object.

#7

I tried Pokoy’s method of “bridging the gaps” and then applied some smoothing, thinking it would help out…but it did the opposite. You can see in the pictures I attached how the flow of edges just kind of clusters together towards the ends of the fillet. It also gets pretty terrible right at the trailing edge’s corner. Making edge rings that follow the contour of the wing and form to the fuselage doesn’t help very much either, as I get a screwed-up area around the trailing edge of the wing.

I’m not quite sure how I would go about FreshRender’s method with the wing geometry that I have…The wing has 26 sides around its perimeter, and the windows on the fuselage would interfere with that many loop cuts. :sad:

Sigh… On the previous aircraft I modeled, I used a spline cage and surfaced it, making the wing base and the entire border of the fillet part of a single spline object…which DID work to a point, but generated a very weird topology that I still have nightmares about. :scream:

#8

Here’s how I did it;

#9

I don’t think the result you have is that bad, you just need to get rid of the pinching and rethink the edgeflow in some areas. As opposed to FreshRender’s example, the fuselage and the belly aren’t one continuous mesh, they’re really two different objects (well, to be more specific they’re more like a lot of panels forming those).
Have a look here, I’m pretty sure it’s similar in your case as it is with any of the newer planes:
http://www.britmodeller.com/reviews/richellis/e195/DSCF2500.jpg

#10

Don’t try and model it all as one mesh. Thats fine for small planes like the P-51, but for larger more complex planes you will end up with lots of unnecessary geometry that will hamper the modelling in other areas. For instance, some parts may need lots of polys whilst others need very few. A uni-mesh has the geometry required for the most complex part running throughout the entire mesh; this is both wasteful and time consuming. In addition, everything within a single uni-mesh has to be modeled the same way. For more complex parts it might be desirable to model them flat and then use a bend modifier. Not to mention that if you are going for realism, a Plane isn’t all one bit of metal.

#11

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