part1

Part one

Warming up exercises for rusty model makers..........Next: creating the fuselage >>>>

For a first attempt, I suggest that you try some freehand modelling. Find some photos of simple aircraft and have a go at making some basic fuselage, wing & canopies. Don't worry about being accurate. Just try to learn how things are attached, and why they are the shape that they are. A few sketches on paper will be invaluable here. You might even want to scan them in to use as backdrops in modeler.

Some simple tips for this stage are to try and keep the shape fairly constant in cross secction down the length. For a WWII fighter, a slightly slab sided oval shape was often used. wings can be a simple aerofoil shape extruded out & scaled down at the tips to form a tapered shape. Tailplanes and fin can be done likewise. Don't overburden yourself with detail, you are learning how to create the forms. Detail such as undercarriage, weapon loads & cockpit detail come later.

Create the wings, fuselage and tail in separate chunks and join them later. If you try to do anything but the most simple shape in one mesh then you are likely to run into difficulties. Lightwave is well suited to this method since it allows you to instantly swap between layers and to save the parts in that state. Most other modellers do of course allow you to create subsets & layers, but Lightwaves method seems more immediate & easy to deal with.

Viewports: a caution

I will be referring to viewports as top, front & side throughout this tutorial. In reality they may be labelled differently. When referring to the front view, this could mean the back view.... In Lightwave 5.6, this would be the face view. The side view can be the left or right view. Use whatever is comfortable, or just match the configuration you see in the images I provide. The reason I'm modelling this way is because my drawings, and just about any scale drawings of aircraft you see, show the port (left) side of the fuselage. If it upsets you, just flip the image by placing a - sign before it's width in the backdrop configuration panel, or flip it horizontally in your paint program.

Don't worry too much about it though, because I will rotate the mesh before I apply textures to it.

Setting up the workplace

Project directories:

Make use of Lightwaves ability to use project directories.

First of all create a directory somewhere with enough space called projects, next create a directory with a sensible name. We are making a Sabre model, so create one called sabre.

Inside your 'sabre' directory, create the images, objects & scenes directories. Once that little lot is set up, it's a simple matter to make new directories for each project. All you have to do is remember to point your content directory to the relevant name, for example c:\projects\sabre. The other alternative is to create a sabre entry in your normal images, objects & scenes directories, for example c:\newtek\images\sabre. Doing it the first way just makes it easier to transfer or zip up the whole lot in one go. The only disadvantage is if you use a lot of the 'standard' Lightwave texture maps, because you will need to make copies of them into your 'sabre\images\' directory.

It's up to you, but bear in mind that I will be referring to the first method throughout.

Background images:

If you have decided on a subject & have 3 view drawings, or other scale reference material, now is the time to get it scanned in & loaded into modeler as background images. Don't worry too much if the scale comes out wrong, you can always resize the model later.

Of course, there's nothing stopping you sizing your images once you have them loaded. If possible, create 3 separate bitmaps, for the front, top & side views. Make sure they are all exactly the same scale as each other, and try to align them so they will line up in the modeler viewports. The grid & tape measure are handy references here. Don't try to rush this, since it is probably the most important part of the modelling process. If you have scanned images, one thing to make sure of is that they are all squared up correctly, by that I mean make sure the images are not rotated, even by a small amount.

This is important, because a side view or a top view rotated by only 1 degree can throw out the whole shape of your model. Aircraft 3-view drawings often have a front view that doesn't align correctly with the top & side views. You will just have to live with this I'm afraid.

Ok, assuming you have some nicely cropped images loaded, and the 'backdrop Settings' panel open, do *not* use autosize, instead, take the pixel size of your image & scale it up or down (usually down) as close as possible to the actual size of your subject. If you have an overall length or wingspan, use that as your basis.

Note: Autosize will size the Image to the dimensions of the mesh visible in the viewport, so don't use that unless you have an image clipped perfectly to the correct outline of the shape & a mesh (even a box) that is the correct dimensions. As an example, if your aircraft has a 11m wingspan & the span on the bitmap is 1000 pixels wide, divide 1000 by 11 which is 90.9. This means that you will need to divide the size of all your images by 90.9 to get them to the correct size in the viewports.

Use a Fixed Aspect Ratio so that you only need to enter the height value. The width will be calculated by Lightwave & will be greyed out. If one of your images is facing the wrong way, adding a minus sign to the Pixel Aspect Ratio will flip the image horizontally & adding a minus sign to the height will flip the image vertically. Now you will need to centre your images so they align with each other.

Use the grid to help you do this, and keep looking at each view for alignment. The top & front views will usually be centred on the X axis, so get that sorted out first. If your original images were created accurately, these values will need very little adjustment.

Our project, the F-86E fits nicely into the WWII fighter category....and before anyone emails me, I know it didn't appear until a couple of years after the war.....

I suggest using a setting of 2 for the patch division levels in the Option panel (o key). We will use Metanurbs, or Subdivision Surfaces later, and this setting will keep things at a reasonable level especially if you freeze the shape into polygons, which has to happen if you have Lightwave prior to version 6.0.

Backdrops for this project

To save time, I have created 3 files called tutorial11.jpg, tutorial12.jpg, & tutorial 13.jpg These contain side, top & front views of the F-86E. Load these into the front, top & side viewports, and save your settings if you have Lightwave 6.x

fig1

The size of the backgrounds was determined by measuring the 1m scale on the image, which was 136 pixels, & dividing the pixel width by that. This gives us a scale that is accurate to within 80mm, so it should be close enough for us.

Here are the settings that you need to enter, and links to the image files: The background images are quite large, so you may want to save them by right clicking on the thumbnails.


figbd1	figbd3	figbd4

tutorial12	tutorial13	tutorial11