Design Tutorial
 

A few people have asked me to write up a tutorial on how I design, so I thought I'd give it a try. I started one many years ago on the FG forum, but kinda lost interest. Hopefully that won't happen this time...

Today's installment is how to prepare the 3-view of the model, using Photoshop.

First step is to pick the 3-view. You want a top, right side, and front view. Any other views are gravy that'll be used later for panel lines.

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The Top view needs to be pointing nose down in order to work in Rhino 3d, so select the top view using the Lasso command...

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...Cut, paste, rotate 180 degrees, then flatten the image.

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Next up is to turn the background into a layer. Double click on the word Background in the layers window, and press enter.

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Then create a new layer,

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and make it the background

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Then go to Image> Adjustments> Invert
Then on the Layers window, set the opacity to 50% (The grey background fades into the background of Rhino) and flatten the image again.

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Make sure to save the file with a new name as a .jpeg


Next installment, importing the 3-view into Rhino.

Thanks i am looking for the good tutorial for rhino:)

This is great, I can actually understand what you are explaining. I might be able to learn this pretty easily the way you are teaching it. Thank you so very much for taking the time to do this for us.

Ok, so it isn't tomorrow yet, but I figured I'd do the next installment anyway.

How to import a 3-view into Rhino

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When Rhino first opens, select "Small Objects-Inches"

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Click inside the Top View window to activate it.

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Go to View> Background Bitmap> Place

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Find the 3-view you prepared in the previous installment and select it

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This part is up to you. I usually select a spot 8 squares left of the green line
and drag to 8 squares to the right of the green line. This makes sure all 3 views are equal size.

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Repeat for all 3 views windows, using the same 3-view (Makes for consistent scaling between the views)

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Now to make sure everything lines up on one common point. Click inside the Top View window again, then go to View> Background Bitmap> Move

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Select a spot on the 3-view that will be common with all 3 views, in this case the extreme nose.

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Turn off ortho, and drag this to the intersection of the red and green lines (you'll probably have to zoom in really close to see it)

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Do the same for all 3 views, using the same spot on each view (top, side and front)

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As a last check, I always draw 2 lines on the extreme bottom of the fuselage to make sure I got everything lined up. (Notice the front has to go down a bit. Just go back to View> Background Bitmap> Move again

Save, giving it a unique name (For this model, I called it RB-45)

The next step is to start designing the model. since the 3-view doesn't have section views, make sure to find as many pictures of the subject as you can to be able to grasp the shape of the fuselage.

You also need to decide now how you are going to develop the parts for the model.

I don't use formers, so there won't be any instructions on how to draw them (I don't know how to anyway)

Time to start designing, starting with the fuselage

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Open up the 3-view again, and make sure there aren't any extra lines on it. (I dunno what happened to mine, it didn't look like this when it left Photoshop)

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Based on the 3-view, and a few images, the fuselage is a simple round tube. So begin by selecting the circle with 2 points, and draw several circles at points along the fuselage when ever it changes sizes, starting at the top and ending at the bottom of the fuselage.

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Once you're satisfied that you've got the general shape of the fuselage covered, time to fill it in. Go to surface> loft

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Select 2 circles that are next to each other and press enter. Make sure the seam is on the bottom.

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In the little dialog box, make sure "Rebuild with XX Control points" is selected, and set to 50. the more control points, the closer to the actual shape you want it will be.
Notice you can't really see what you just drew...

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Click in the Perspective window and click in it
Then go to View> Shaded to take care of that

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Continue lofting, making sure to select surface edge (It automatically lines up the seams, saving some work)

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Almost done with the fuselage

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Normally, fuselage noses come to a point and you can just keep lofting. But this particular plane has a rounded nose. This leads to the difficult decision to use petals.(Sorry guys) Start off by selecting arc, and clicking on the top and bottom of the last circle of the fuselage...

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Then pull out to a rounded arc

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Next up is to select the arc, type "revolve" in the command line, and press enter/ Then click the center of the arc, and the center of the circle (make sure the center snap is turned on) move the arc around 360 degrees until you get a half sphere.

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Draw a line starting at the center of the half sphere, and extending strait up beyond it. Then go to transform> Array> Polar, pick the center of the sphere again and type in an even number, in this case I used 10.

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Select all 10 lines, then go to curve> curve from objects> project.

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From the front view, select the sphere to project onto.

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And you get this (This is also how you do panel lines, but more on that later)

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Now, select the nose piece, and click the "Split" button

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Select the projected lines, and press enter

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And you have petals!

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The fuselage is finished. Next up is the Canopy, wings, engines, tails and landing gear. Then panel lines.

Aaron, if you save the image as a .png, you won't get the artifacts/blurring. And the actual size of the blueprint is also a factor in how detailed it shows in Rhino. Sometimes it is better to have several images (one for each view) then one large one.

wait to see wings and canopy

Many thanks for this tutorial ! I will use it for Sketchup.

Usually I don't have any problems with 3-views. I dunno what happened with this one. I started using one image for every view because it was a lot faster than trying to line up and make sure 3 different images were the same size and scale. When I used 3 separate images, it'd take me an hour or 3 of work making sure each one was the same scale and lined up properly. Now I can drop a 3-view in in about 5 minutes.

And I picked 8 squares because it gives a reasonable amount of detail without overloading my dinosaur of a computer.