MS-AI Cowling Finally Done

[Bullethead 12]

With mucho help, especially from Hairyspin, I finally got the cowling done and can now move on to other things. FINALLY!! Drinks on me .

 

I ended up detaching the cowling as a separate object for seveal reasons.

 

 

• Once I get the cockpit area shaped, I will need to delete 1/2 the fuselage when I start work on the tail and strut attachment points. The cowling is asymmetrical (more slots on right side) so can't be cloned and mirrored when I make the recreate the deleted 1/2 of the fuselage. And no way was I going to fill in the extra holes on the cloned half--WAY too much work.
• With the cowling as a separate object sans firewall, I can easily gain access to its inner surfaces for texturing.
• Having it separate makes a realistic slight discontinuity between it and the fuselage. After all, the cowling was a separate piece in real life.

The cowling was made as follows (per Hairyspin's instructions):

 

 

1. Extruded outer shape from firewall and deleted end cap poly, leaving the fuselage with an open front end (no more firewall) and the outer surface still part of the fuselage.
2. Cut, shaped, smoothed, and otherwise fiddled all day with all the damn holes and slots.
3. Cloned the outer surface, shrunk it just a hair, closed the rear end with a firewall, and flipped the normals to make the inner surface.
4. Attached the inner surface to the fuselage and welded the front opening of inner and outer surfaces. This is what I posted pics of last night.

Once I decided to make the cowl a separate object, I proceeded as follows:

 

 

1. Selected and detached all cowling polys (inner and outer) EXCEPT the firewall, and hid this.
2. The firewall was left, but because it had been part of the shrunken inner cowling originally, it had a small gap all the way around between it and the fuselage sides. So I moved most of its vertices out and welded them to the end vertices of the fuselage side polys.
3. I made an edge across the lower part of the firewall and deleted this new poly, leaving the firewall flat on the bottom. Then I cut the bottom fuselage stringer edges at the point where the lower fuselage slants up to meet bottom of the firewall and deleted the parts from there to the front. I did it this way instead of Boolean cutting because it just seemed easier.
4. Created new polys to make the sloping part of the fuselage between the cuts and the firewall.
5. Hid the fuselage, unhid the cowling, and created new polys between the inner and outer surfaces in the lower arc where the bottom edge of the cowling hangs down in front of the step in the fuselage.
6. I left the cowling in its original position in relation to the fuselage.

Below is the result. I think it looks pretty good. Note that the above process cleaned up the graphical trash in Gmax's "User" view. I still have some questions, however....

 

 

• The rear edges of the cowling outer surface bump up exactly with the front edges of the fuselage sides and vertices of both parts are co-located. Is this bad? Should I move the cowling forward an RCH?
• If I move the cowling forward, then I'll have to add more polys between its inner and outer surfaces at the back end. That would be only 14 more polys so not the big a deal, just more fiddly work.
• There are no polys between the inner and outer surfaces inside all the holes (7) and slots (3). This isn't really noticeable except up close and when your line of sight is pretty much tangent to the cowling's surface, as you can see in one of the attached pics. Should I add all these polys? That would be about 120 additional polys and the cowling already has a bit over 400 due to all the damn holes in it.

Anyway, thanks again for the help and thanks in advance for suggestions on improvements.

 

[ConradB 0]

That looks fantastic! Great job! Have a big v-mug of stout on me bro! You've earned it man!

[Bullethead 12]

Thanks, Conrad This was a rather dauntingly complex piece of airplane for a rookie. I'm proud to be done with it.

 

But now I'm getting into the decking around the cockpit and guns, and it's even more of a challenge. The cowling, at the bottom line, is all made of standard shapes, except for the curved slot in the upper left. The cockpit decking, OTOH is best described as a blob with various holes, slots, and irregularly curved notches cut into it at strange angles, and all this has to fair neatly on top of the cylindrical fuselage. This one is definitely going to take some work.....

 

HOWEVER, once I get THAT done, I can start on the fun parts like tail feathers and wings

 

I picked the MS-AI because I thought at 1st glance it would be fairly simple. Only 1 wing, simple tail surfaces, round fuselage. Little did I know........

[hairyspin 1]

Co-located vertices afaik are only a problem when they're part of the same object. Since you've decided to make the cowling a separate object, the problem disappears. I made my current model (mostly) from one object and then divided it up into fuselage, tail, l_wing, r_wing, etc by selecting polys and Detaching as an Object. So it has lots of collocated vertices which belong to different objects and I have mine flying in the sim...

 

To fill or not to fill in the (very small) gaps? Your choice! I'd say do the six polys for the back edge of the cowl and see what it looks like in the sim. You can always go back and add the other polys later if you think they're needed.

 

Don't worry too much about poly count just yet, CFS3 is one of the most forgiving sims in that department. The limit you do have to watch out for is the 64K vertex limit per object, like cowling, fuselage, l_wing etc. You ain't anywhere near that with the cowling! Models of over 1 million vertices have been built for CFS3 and they didn't cripple the sim - this was an experiment, so I can't tell you where to download such a model!! The real performance killer is textures - the more the slower, generally.

There are models around of 15,000 polys at LOD100 which fly and display just fine, even on an old clunker like my last rig. Conrad's rig would eat them for breakfast!

 

The cowl looks good, too!

Edited February 1, 2010 by hairyspin

[Bullethead 12]

Co-located vertices afaik are only a problem when they're part of the same object.

 

Ah, good. I love it when I don't have to mess with anything .

 

The cowl looks good, too!

 

That means a lot. Thanks