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Raptor 3D Project - Edits 10

Doors, Vents, and other "Bumps":

There are a multitude of doors, exhausts, vents, bumps, depressions, and other bits of geometry on the actual F/A-22. Compare this image to the current state of my project below, and I think you'll agree that these details affect the distinct look of the aircraft, and are worth adding..

How?

Over the last few years, I've developed a method for using boolean "cutters" to do all these things, and I should mention that this is one of the largest tutorial sections in my DVD, "CAD for Modelers, Volume Two". See the link here for info.

For me, an extra bit of preparation was required...
Remember that in this rather unusual case, I began with another artist's model, which already included, for example, the landing gear doors and weapons bay doors. This image shows the original model.

In the process of making this model more scale, I've moved all of those doors. Before moving ahead with the following process, I thought it was prudent to remove as many of those "door polygons" as possible. Otherwise, you end up with a real mess... a combination of the old doors and new doors, which could be visually confusing, and more difficult to edit.

Using the fuselage as the example, the method can be described like this.

Make a COPY of the fuselage, and keep the current version, in case we have to backtrack. (Safety first! Backup, backup, backup.)
Create the boolean cutters for each opening. (Various methods for that are shown below.) Make a copy of your boolean "cutters", and save them, in case something has to be re-done later. Failure to do this means that you have to go back to step one, if something goes wrong. Saving the cutters has another advantage, which is they can be used to create some of the "bays" that will naturally be beneath some of the doors. (a weapons bay, for example.) The "undo" function might be enough to save you, but what if the power goes out, or your computer freezes? Be safe, and save everything often!
Do a boolean operation, resulting in the UNION of the fuselage and the doors, and then make one copy of that object. Then, working on one of those copies, remove and save all of the doors, deleting the fuselage. You'll now have two objects... a fuselage WITH all the doors in place, and one "object" that is ONLY the doors you just created.
The doors, vents, etc., that you've created will often have different textures, and some of them will probably have a "function", such as opening and closing, in an animation. So, make a copy of the "doors" object. Repeat this step for as many doors as you have. I generally do these in batches, so I feel like I've accomplished making more than making one opening at a time.
Then, go into each copy, and delete all doors but one... the one you're focusing on. At the end, you have all the doors separated, properly shaped and positioned, but able to be textured and animated separately.
The last step is to go to the copy of the fuselage that still has all the doors still in place, and delete the doors. Since the boolean cutters will have outlined the door's polygons, that will be easy, and you'll have a fuselage with precisely-shaped openings for each door.

Making and positioning the cutters:

The current model, ready for the next step

Depending on which 3D software you use, there are many ways to create these boolean cutters. For the doors shown here, I used a simple, yet precise method. Using the Lockheed-Martin drawings as a reference, and verifying them with photos, I created simple objects from a series of straight lines. (Stealth-related doors tend to have straight edges, when viewed from an isometric viewpoint.)

These shapes can be extruded as required, to create the openings, the doors, and the internal bays associated with them.

To build each "door cutter", I zoomed in close to each door shown on the drawing, and basically "traced" the outlines of the doors with straight lines. I then connected the edges of those lines, creating the shapes you see above. Here are the first few, shown with the "red glass" shader, and positioned over the Lockheed-Martin drawings.

Remember to always use an isometric camera in your 3D software, when doing this kind of thing, or you may end up being surprised at where your parts appear later. (!)

The same door cutters, positioned over the current 3D model

I'll wait until I have all the doors I want to create finished, before actually making the boolean cuts. During the process, the red glass shader shows me which ones are ready, and which ones still need to be created. For now, I'm leaving them floating above the fuselage, as shown here.

Here', I've created cutters for both the side and bottom weapons bay doors, and extruded them. The side bay doors use a single cutter, which passed through the entire fuselage. Each bottom weapons bay has it's own cutter, since there's a small separation between them, on the center line. These were also extruded out a bit. The precise length of the extrusion isn't important at this point, but it's worth mentioning that the extrusion shouldn't go far enough into the fuselage to later disturb any of it's internal geometry.

The nose gear door cutter is very simple, and positioned on the centerline. The main gear requires two cutters for each side. One goes into the fuselage sides, representing the small door at the bottom. The other cutter goes into both the upper fuselage, and lower part of the wing, representing the larger upper door.

Weapons bay and landing gear doors all visible here. I'm showing the cutters this way as a demonstration, but actually, you can simplify the process, by working on one half of the fuselage at a time, and simply copying and mirroring it for the other side. For the landing gear and weapons bay doors, that's fine. Just remember that not all doors are the same on both sides. (the gun door on the upper fuselage, for example)

Click the "Edits 11" link below, to continue.

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