www.colacola.se - by Anders Lejczak, 3D Models for download / freebies

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Before we start modeling our aircraft we need some sort of aid that will help us get the shape and proportions right. Without a proper reference setup this would be very difficult. All kind of blueprints are available on the net. My favourite source is www.airwar.ru.

Finding decent blueprints
I have downloaded 2 sheets with blueprints like these you see in this picture. I can't use them as they are becuse they need some 2D editing first.

As you see in the next picture I will create one top view, one side view, one front view and several cross section views from these blueprints.

Creating textures for the reference planes
Make sure that your textures all have the same size (for example 1024*1024) and that the blueprints arecorrectly scaled.

The thin green lines just illustrates that I compare the wingtips etc to make sure that everything is scaled correctly.

The red crosses are used to mark the middle of the texture. These come in handy in the next step.

Aligning the planes
Create 3 new planes, one for the bottom view, one for the side view and one for the front view. Apply the top, side and front textures and align the planes so that the red lines meet (marked with green circles). Make the planes editable and delete the polygons you don't need.

Setting the shader/texture preview properties
To be able to view the blueprints even if you are in wireframe mode you need to add a display tag to the planes. Edit the display tag and check "use shading mode Guarag shading".

This is not all. The blueprints are visible but very blurred/low res. Put the blueprint texture in the color channel and set the "texture preview size" to 1024*1024 in the illumination channel. Now the blueprints should appear as sharp as in the image below.

Setting upp the cross sections
The above image shows how the cross sections are set up. Create a new plane and apply one of the cross section textures (don't forget to use the shader setting I described in the previous paragraph). Align the plane so that the red lines meet (marked with green circles) and move the plane into position. The green arrow shows that cross section "A" is moved into the place where "A" is marked on the side view. Delete all the polygons from the cross section plane that you don't need.

Repeat the procedure for each cross section until you have something that looks like this. The reference setup file is available for download in the next chapter if you wish to download it instead of creating it yourself.

NEXT CHAPTER: Modeling!