WIP: F-14 B/D
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Hey buddy ! You still alive ?
Ara said it best - immortality, Baby. Plus lots of booze in the wee hours - jk.
Work and my other project been killing me lately so progress is slow. I managed to collapse the entire MLG including rotation and so on without rigging it to see how and more importantly IF it fits. Needless to say it doesn’t :D.
However, it’s not as bad as it looks. The nose gear fits just fine. On a more serious note, the glovebox has to be thickened a bit to the bottomside so the wheel fits. I don’t plan on changing the general shape of the fuselage as it took 100s of hours to put it into this shape and it resembles RL 99.9% so any misalignment is down to the MLG and I don’t plan on remodeling any part of the engine pods/lower fuselage. That being said the gear sits at a neat 90deg at the moment and in reality it tilts to almost 100deg and the wheel slightly inward to 95 so that will save some space.
Rigging this will be a bitch and shortcuts won’t work, I realized that when I manually rotated the whole thing. In RL there is less than half an inch between the wheel and the forward inner landing gear door during retraction so that’s gonna be interesting.
Apart from that it fits nicely in terms of length, width and wheel diameter:
See how far the wheel cuts the engine pod line? That’s why it literally rotates into the box during the last 10% of main strut rotation - insaine design.
Lessons learned:
Even the Grumman blueprints are worth sh*t when it comes to MLG proportions and measurements.
Never model a landing gear in down position :).
Whatever floats your boat, Baby.
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Here’s to cheer you up, a vid I found in my daily navigation in the depths of the interwebs :
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Stingray,
I just wanted to drop in and say that I only found out about this project yesterday, and Holy Mackerel, it’s awesome! Also, mad props on learning to use Blender - I never managed to sit down and get myself to do it. About the only thing I’m apprehensive about is the nosecone shape, and I know you won’t let anything less than excellent leave your workspace.
Freakin’ Awesometastic Sauce, Man!
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November 28th? Wow almost 2 months…. You still alive out there Stingray?
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Well well well what have we here…
That’s a bunch of beautiful captures posted there. The final Iraq cruise video actually motivated me to start this project in the first place, thanks for that!
Happy new years ya’ll! A bunch of you probably thought this is another never ending dead in the water once promising and now left behind project - rest assured that no cat gets left behind here :).
Back to business, Baby.
Even the Grumman blueprints are worth sh*t when it comes to MLG proportions and measurements.
I retract that. While they are slightly inaccurate when it comes to the profile view in terms of angle and scale they are dead accurate when it comes to the ‘wheelbox’. It took me ages to find the error here you see above. No matter how I tweaked the landing gear it just wouldn’t fit in the bodyshell and constantly protrude through the landing gear doors…until now.
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Great Way to Start the morning baby!
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So what was the problem? This.
Basically the entire MLG sticks out of the fuselage. Move it up? Didn’t work. Rescale? Can’t cuz the scale is close 100% authentic (at least total length and diameter). Move it in? Can’t cuz then it won’t rotate freely. So what to do…
Here’s another look:
So the ‘wheelbox’ is too small, sits too far back and all in all just didn’t fit. So I remodelled and repositioned the box. The entire gear was then tilted inward slightly as per the blueprint and the wheel strut extended out a good 50% more. Finally enlarged the wheel somewhat and fiddled with the hyfraulic lines and stuff on the MLG.
That looks better. Now need to check for clearance inward (engine pod/air intake), outward (landing gear doors), up (glovebox) and the upper inside rear edge cuz that is where the wings go when fully retracted. I tested this with full wing sweep and not oversweep but it should work. As you can see the margins are intensely small (like less than 10mm in some areas. Again the packaging is amazing on this design.
Wings:
As can be seen even in oversweep there is enough room.
Glovebox:
Enginepod:
That’s gotta be one of my favorite shots of this model ever!
Now the weapon fairings:
Also clear. Outlined is the ‘waist section’ of the fuselage housing the gear, this needs some fine tuning in the coming days now that it all fits together.
Some impressions:
Delta Tomcat, Baby.
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Impressive piece of artwork!!
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Welcome back stingray.
Keep “on track” baby :p.
Nikos. -
That’s gotta be one of my favorite shots of this model ever!
Agreed.
Some beautiful work you are doing. You deserve a solid nob job.
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I bet back in the days when Tomcat was in the works, Grumman would love to have you on board the design board…
Piece of work… man!!! Thanks for all your hard work!! -
Stunning work and commitment to detail!
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Thanks guys for all the comments - much appreciated! I swapped out the display on my Thinkpad for a full HD AUO panel. Since I usually work on this while on the train or plane the resolution helps a lot with workspace in 3D programs.
Here’s a taste of one of the few T430s on the planet with this screen
Currently working on the nose gear and fitting it into the fuselage, also started on the cockpit. Slowly getting there…update later today.
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As usual it took a little while longer but less than 3-4 weeks
Nose gear in final proportion (details and mesh optimization still pending):
Landing light and signal box corrected, wheels put in correct size and distance with the help of a twisted pic:
Even with the correction which resulted in a slightly widened fuselage opening and increasing total length it still fits an imperfect blueprint quite well:
Overall less adaptation needed in contrast to the main landing gear:
Total tris for landing gear is at 17k tris, reduction to less than 13k without losing too much detail is unlikely:
Here you can see the difference to my original shape:
Finally corrected the height of the nose gear compartment:
Still need to shorten the main compartment and the main strut a bit to align with the print. You can guess what’s next by looking at the blueprint :).
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Some more progress on the pit. Once I got the Rio panel shape figured out I’ll separate the canopy from the fuselage and integrate it. As you can see from the shape it’s already adapted to the fuselage body and will not collide with the nose gear compartment. Connecting it to the canopy side rails and windshield frame will be the tricky stuff. How much detail will be added? Not much more, the sticks and some ejection seat additions plus some cables and details that you will see from the outside through the canopy and that’s it. Planning to keep it below 1000 tris.
Standalone:
Slowly filled with life
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You 3D modellers make it look so easy!
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Pit fits pretty well as expected. Now got a separate and moving canopy. Still have to model the canopy hinges. Ejection seat position and proportion is fine, consoles and stuff need adjustment.
Now on to fitting it to the AC, especially in the area of canopy rails and windshield frame it will be shall we say ‘interesting’ :).
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