work in progress - BWB airplane

[ӔO]

A next generation concept airplane in the works at nasa and boeing. The Blended-Wing-Body, or BWB airplane done with sketchup. obviously not a total copy with some artistic license.
IRL, we're very unlikely to see a passenger variant of this unless boeing/nasa works out a way to keep passengers near the wings from being tossed violently whenever the plane makes a turn, but since this is a game, a moot point


still need to add windows and control surfaces.
those lines you see across the fuselage, I think they're just incorrectly drawn polygons. removing the internal 'walls' should fix it.
possibly fix the size of the engines on the 4 engine variant.
oh, and some paint/textures obviously.

[vilvoh]

Looks like a mix between F-117 Nighthawk and B-2 Spirit. Perhaps the engines should me inside the fuselage.

[VS]

Nah, that's where the engines are on this thing...

http://duckduckgo.com/Blended_wing_body

[Gouv]

Looks promising so far.

[ӔO]

slightly stretched front end, smoothed out some of the jagged looking sections.

guesstimated capabilities...
4 engine version would fall somewhere in between A380-800 and An-225 in terms of payload capacity, size is similar to 747-8
2+1 engine version that is smaller by roughly 60~70% in size and capacity of the 4 engine version. Would be a direct replacement for 747 series.

still need to figure out a way to add windows and doors.

[Gouv]

still need to figure out a way to add windows and doors.

Oh boy, if you dont find any, welcome to blender
Seriously, I really liked SketchUp at the beginning, but switched to Blender pretty soon after that.
Maybe I was just stupid, but i couldnt set the Camera and Sun right. Blender is much more precise there and i like Precision.

[ӔO]

I think I've figured it out.
just using comic font and adding "...." makes windows.
I realized, at this level of detail, you can't see the doors anyways.

@gouv only way to get the lighting right in sketchup, it seems, would be to turn on shadows. but then you obviously have shadows to deal with, instead of just having lighter, dark and bright sides. I just can't figure out blender. it's too much like gentoo when I want something simpler to work with.

changes:
added some volume to the turbine cowling and exhaust structure
minor underside shape adjustments
added windows
turned on the "smoothen edges" function in sketchup.
turned off shadows.

I think this is pretty much, it. now to export them into a 2D program to cut out the tiles to 128 or 192 sizes.

[Gouv]

Looks pretty nice. I'd say, a few more Details and it's done.

[ӔO]

what sort of details did you have in mind?
structural joints? control surface gaps? text?

[Gouv]

A few Lines/Areas in Player-Color, I guess. Maybe just some Noise=Dirt to make the Surface look more real. Btw., does SketchUp supports Textures?

[ӔO]

sketchup does support textures, but no bump mapping or anything more advanced.

Ah, now that you mention it, it does lack player colours, noise and dirt. I'll add those.

[ӔO]

just a general idea of the colour scheme.



And as you can see, no details left like textures when shrunken down to size.

[vilvoh]

I would not use any textures with this model. It looks great with plain colors. Indeed, I would try to place the player color instead.

[VS]

Agreed, this plain colour scheme makes it look minimalistically elegant.

[ӔO]

the blues used in the model are player colours.
would it be better to just paint the entire white into a player colour?

or actually, I'll just release the source files so people can paint them to their liking, but I'll make the plain colour version.

[MoTw]

would it be better to just paint the entire white into a player colour?

No, don't do it!  I think VS and vilvoh are right, it looks fantastic with a plain colour scheme... White fits quite good, I think.

[ӔO]

and done. did it in 192 size as that seems to be the going thing for large aircraft.
(ok, I admit, the 128 size just didn't turn out good)

props to the person who made shades. made it a lot easier to clean up unwanted special pixels and adding special pixels.


source
http://files.[ simutrans [dot] us (site down, do not visit) ]/files/get/OjpfjZl9PE/bwb-29xx-series.rar

[vilvoh]

In this case, as the object is quite large, in order to improve the quality I would recommend to render it double in size and then rescale it. The rescaling process will blur the edges so you'll have to fix that but the result is smooth and detailed enough. It's a very common technique for pak128 objects, for example.

[Zeno]

and done. did it in 192 size as that seems to be the going thing for large aircraft.

Oops, it's my fault not having told you about before!
All the planes have been redrawn in 192 size, and there's an asymetric scale to translate real length values to pixel values. F.i., a plane that IRL is 80 meters long would have a length of 153 pixels once rendered; 129 pixels for 60 meters, or 77 pixels for 20 meters. Note the scale is not linear. If you want so I can give you the details of the full scaling table.

Btw, about vilvoh's suggestion, I usually render two versions for objects: one using with oversampling and another without it, and then I use the version without OSA to make a mask which I use to crop the OSA version. It's an easy and quick way to get OSA advantages while avoiding blurry edges

[vilvoh]

That's another way to get the same result. In fact, if you rescale it using cubic or Sinc3 algorithms, you'll get more or less the same effect as if you render the image with OSA.

[ӔO]

I wouldn't worry about the scaling too much. there's no hard number to go on, other than being slightly smaller than a A380, which I'm pretty sure I achieved.

comparison of sizes, and they seem to fit right in


but I can rework the images with the suggested methods too.

[vilvoh]

The plane next to the big version is as A380? in other words, is it as big as an A-380 in real life?

EDIT: Yes, it's a A380...  

[ӔO]

yes, the wingspan should be.
Biggest problem with making conventional commercial airplanes larger than A380 size is that most airports were already equipped for 747s, and A380 body size is really close to the maximum size usable at those airports.

The real deal is supposed to be the smaller version. It's smaller size makes it usable at any airport that can land a A330 or 767 but have greater capabilities than those two. Or at least that's what I've read.

A340 and 777 are still relatively new long range airplanes, so I didn't place the smaller version in this category because it would be redundant.

[Bigtop]

Really interesting for that...