Forum: 3D Modeling


Subject: Modeling aircraft wing roots (and other nasty joints)

MarcoCraine opened this issue on Sep 21, 2013 ยท 20 posts


pauljs75 posted Sun, 29 September 2013 at 10:13 PM

I think it gets tricky when the wing attaches to the fuselage at the very top or bottom. There's different sets of edge flows that you have to make work together. If the wings are attached midway, it's a heck of a lot easier since you can let Catmull-Clarke take care of most things for you. (And if not wing/fuselage edge flows, then there may be wing/nacelle-bulge edge flows, or similar topology occuring with tail surfaces.)

Not sure if it'd be any help, but I have a few free aircraft at ShareCG that you could download and study. I think all of them have the wing attach at the bottom, and for the most part I think I've done what I can to take care of edge flows in a reasonable manner. Sometimes you also have to tweak those verts manually to get the tension or transition right.

Also if the mesh doesn't deform, and you don't plan on smoothing it anymore, it's ok to have a few tris here and there. And sometimes a tri may be needed to split what would be a non-planar quad in order to take out any ambiguity a render engine might have.

BTW, that screen grab looks like Blender there... I'm not new to 3D, but I'm starting out at Blender after they got to the 2.6x versions and sufficiently noob-proofed it. So I've been using it a lot now. Great rendering and animation (Cycles is awesome), but for working with polygon meshes - I still prefer an old version of Wings3D. You might want to give that a shot since it seems to deal with edge flow better than Blender (imo), and has faster workflow when it comes to models and how their own geometry relates to them. (Blender might be able to do some of the same things, but it's not as obvious or involves a lot more steps.)


Barbequed Pixels?

Your friendly neighborhood Wings3D nut.
Also feel free to browse my freebies at ShareCG.
There might be something worth downloading.