Working from a factory point of view

I often find that photos of an aircraft in it's factory primer, or "delivery" state are revealing and helpful. They point out where major structures, hatches, vents, etc., are, so I decided to color my in-progress model the same way.

One of the reasons the actual aircraft is so smooth is because it utilizes very large, pre-formed skin sections, rather than many small panels, the way aircraft used to be built. Although not visible in these images, I've already created "selection sets" for those skin pieces, so I can place rivets at those seams later. Next, some of the major internal structures.

Wing and canard fairings, engine nacelles, etc..

The plan on this aircraft is to get the most important parts of the exterior to their near-final state, then move on to the interior parts. The reason is simply that I have more precise data for the exterior than for some of the interior. Once I've got the interior finished, I'll come back to further exterior details like rivets, lights, and the landing gear.

So, I've spent the last few days cleaning up some of the details, including the angle of the rear ventral fins, shape of the vertical tail's "cap", fairings around the canard. I still have a small error at the very front tip of the fuselage to fix, (should be more round, not flat, of course) and some very small curves to fix in the windscreen shape. Here are a few renderings, in the aircraft's basic white color scheme, so you can see some of the nice reflections that appear on the actual aircraft.. Modo is making this work a real pleasure, and I'm happy with the results so far. The original version, done in Carrara, took months. I've done the work you see here in just a little over a week.

Refining the major exterior parts:

In the next few renderings, I've fixed the position of most of the external lights and antennas, improved the shape of the engine nacelles and the canard fairing, added detail around the vertical fin cap, and rebuilt the propellers. Although there will be ongoing work on the exterior, I'm preparing to start on the interior. This will incude both the visible cabin items, as well as some interior structural items.

The main cabin interior

This model will have a detailed, scale interior. So the first step is to set the boundaries for the internal equipment, by creating an accurate cabin liner. In this example, I create the passenger area cabin liner. (The cockpit liner is a little different contour, and will be done separately.)

Click here or on the image, to see a brief tutorial movie on how this was done. (4.8MB)

More coming soon...