Greetings,

I'd consider myself a more or less routined hobbyist, but I've run into an interesting problem I'd like to share (and hear) some thoughts about:

I've been working on modeling fictional WWII-style aircraft, and I can't seem to wrap my mind around a particularly interesting problem: Modeling a realistic, smooth wing root. I'm working with Blender, although the question concerning the "right" technique is probably universal.

When it comes to wing roots on aircraft, you'll generally find two approaches in people's models:

a) The wing and the fuselage blend together fluently, in a realistic manner. The author obviously bothered to go through great lengths to achieve that.

b) The wing simply sticks out the fuselage, with little to no effort to smooth the wing root, leave alone to create a closed mesh. Seems you'll often get away with that if the viewer/user doesn't look too closely, but technically... I've noticed this is a weak spot an many aircraft meshes that would otherwise look great.

The problem about coming up with a general-purpose solution seems to be that both the fuselage and the wings of an aircraft are rather specific shapes, and no matter what technique you use to create each part, they never lend themselves particularly well to merging them to a single, tidy mesh.

Any thoughts or ideas on a problem like this?

Personally, I seem to achieve fair results by starting with two low-res cylinders, roughly laying out the general wing profile and hull shape, and then merging the two while they're still low-poly. It comes with much manual fiddling, but I feel it's a fair compromise. Still, this method seems to have a price in terms of poly-efficiency: It still requires wild cutting through polys and merging of vertices to create a realistic joint. Doing it before applying subdivisions requires the addition of "buffer" polygons around the joint to brute the curvature in shape, and that leads to lots and lots of useless little polys once the model is subdivided. And even then, it seems to be more trial-&-error than actual tidy work. But once the joint is there, detail work on wings and fuselage parts is rather hassle-free.

I suppose I'll go with this technique for my current project as it seems to look rather pretty - but I feel there must be some smarter techniques for joining two shapes that just don't seem to fit too well.

While I hope my rather primitive approach might help provide insights to other artists with similiar problems, I'm also curious about any ideas on how to handle such nasty headscratchers.

Best Regards,

Abendwind