Fuselage/Wing Connections:

The existing model's wings are not really airfoil-shaped, but rather, a sort of a box, with sharp leading and trailing edges. They look fine when texture-mapped, but again, I'm going for a true-to-scale appearance, so I'll be rebuilding them. (The wings on the actual F-22 are really interesting, if you're an aviation fan.) Naturally, that will affect the fuselage/wing connection area, which I haven't touched yet. (same for the horizontal and vertical tail parts)

So, using the drawings, I tried to determine where the wings join the fuselage. It makes sense to do it at the same place as the actual aircraft, for scale effect. Doing this test also showed me something about how to build the new landing gear doors.

1. Looking at the TOP view drawing, I constructed what will later be used as a "boolean cutter", along the red lines.

3. Based on my photos, the lines shown on the BOTTOM view drawing are more convincing to me, so I've adjusted my cutter to match. This step also showed that the outboard main landing gear doors need to be built into the wing, duplicated, and THEN the wing gets cut. (Otherwise, I'd be cutting those doors.) Later, I'll show you a variety of ways to create hard-to-model geometry, using these boolean cutters. I'm setting this cutter aside for now, until the wings are rebuilt.)

2. Looking at the BOTTOM view drawings, with my cutter in place, you can see that the lines don't match. "Stealth documentation"? At this point, I went and looked at the photos I have.

4. Here's the cutter, in perspective view.

So, here's how the aircraft looks, so far

Next, I re-joined the (left/right) fuselage halves, then re-separated them into top/btm halves, so I could work on the uppermost and lowermost parts of the fuselage with less effort. I also re-attached the canopy and canopy frame to the fuselage, so I could refine it's shape at the same time. (These are only medium quality "preview" renderings, so you'll see some "jaggies" here and there.)

Refining the upper fuselage, canopy and canopy frame

The lower part of the fuselage was deepened more (height) and then I set to work finalizing the canopy and canopy frame. This was done with the fuselage, canopy, and canopy frame all joined into one piece, but separate shaders were used to make the work easier. In these images, you're looking through the fuselage, which has an overall "red glass" shader, the canopy frame has a "green glass" shader, and the canopy itself has a "plain glass" shader.

At the start, you can see the the canopy itself is ok, but the frame is out of alignment with the drawing.

Canopy and frame extended rearward... Frame still needs tweaking.

Canopy and canopy frame closer to finalized.

Re-assembled plane, to have a look at the overall effect

Click the Edits 04" link below to continue.