I find the BIrail very usefull where the extrude fails - like creating the semi- circular extrusion on my nurbs-truck windscreen

It should have worked fine with extrude but no it did not !


Nir

Woke up late today, but now, im on it.

Next, I'll do the actual modeling and tweaking of the "tricky" part, which will connect the front fuselage to the rear.

The work done below is just to get the cruves right. The skinning can be done a little differently. Connecting a lofted surface with a boundry and then to a lofted surface at the end. But in order to use the boundry, I have to slice all cross-section-curves in half. Ending up with half a fuselage. But it should be easy to attatch the halves together. It did work with the test I performed earlier.

I have now used the boundry tool. The boundry tool is used with three or four curves. In order for easy tweaking, I kept the CV count down.

edit:
oh, the typos... the boundry shape is of course NOT perfect!

Update
 

Well, I remodeled the former surface in a new way. This time I limited the area for the boundry tool and did a rail op. on the part of the fuselage that was going to be pretty smooth.

Using the boundry tool on a limited way, makes the problem of surface irregularities smaller... um well, anyway...

This is the finished part. I wish I knew more about modeling with nurbs patches, but do not have the patience to try to make this part better until I know more about nurbs-patching.

Next I'll have to deal with the front part, which will be the second-hardest part in the project. And soon I'll be onto the fun parts... the details...

Weeeeeeeeh...
 

I finished the nose and although it ain't perfect, I feel it is ok. Besides, the old planes are a bit bumpy aren't they?

Instead of using boundry or rail tool, I made several curves and lofted them forward.

Shazam...
 

The modeling of the tail is well under way.

Almost finished with the tail, I hope you dont mind
 

It is a pleasure to be able to model this and not constantly worry about modeling it the "wrong way".

Tail = 98% done
 

Now off to the floater.

Shaping up very nicely.

It's amazing how much you are learning from this experience.

Keep it up!

Thanks! I feel more comfortable when using the skinning tools, and coming up with decent tweaks, in order to shape a surface the way I want (or a shape that is close enough to my aspirations).

great stuff!
 

yeah, birail, I've also gotten birail 1 to work mostly - i think the reason why it usually fail is that the ends aren't intersecting the rail curves or that the rail curves have a different number of knots... or if the curve is over 90 degrees - apparently it don't like that neither. Hm. I had birail 2 work once as well with really exciting results - it got me to believe that birail 3+ must be a most amazing too capable of creating long, complicated, ever evolving organic mechanical shapes at the drop of a hat. haven't got it to work yet though. Oh and one thing i didn't catch at first was that you choose a profile curve and then have to press enter and then you get the prompt to choose rail 1, then enter and then rail 2... or perhaps it's only me who was so blind as to not get that right off... :)

Have you seen the NURBS modeling tutorial with the suburu? Incredibly helpful if very long and convoluted. Server seems to be down at the moment but it was fine earlier. Link is:

http://www.blissdd.com/

to get the tutorial you will have to register. Worth it though.

The model looks great! More!

Small update
 

That suburu tut still fascinates me. I still have things to learn from it.

I apologize for my lack of updates.
Here is the start of the work on the floater.

I tried to use the birail tools and the boundry tool, but the loft tool seems to work great.

I made the curves and lofted them. The trick is to tweak the cv's of the surface to get that shape I want.

The rear part is ok. The middle part is gonna be ok. The issue now is to tweak the lofted surface to shape the front part.

This looks ok I think
 

I inserted isoparms all over the front part, thus being able to tweak the cv's to shape an edge.

This is the most successful tweaking episode ever! :D:)

Heres the pic
 

Yup...

Just some preparations...
 

Some preparations before I attatch the three surfaces together.

I have inserted isoparms at the edge of the other two parts, so that the attach option doesn't give me a wierd shape.

I guess I inserted too many isoparms here, but I'll go for it.

Another thing; I also inserted isoparms in the other direction (along the model) on the two backmost surfaces, in order to give them the same number of spans as the front surface.