Anim8or and fairings

[Zatnikitelman]

I'm completely stuck on trying to create a 5m fairing for a LV I'm working on. I can build a complete fairing in Anim8or, but when I cut it apart, I'm left with no faces at the cut parts. I built one part of a 3 segment fairing in TurboCAD, but it screws up the normals! It makes the normals all face outward (relative to the center of all 3 segments) so the inner surface's normals are inverted and for some reason, the face select doesn't work right in Anim8or with the imported file.
Anyone have a solution? Or perhaps a tutorial on building rocket fairings?
Thanks,
Zat

 

[GregBurch]

It's a good learning project. Build a polygon with the number of faces you want. Extrude it, giving yourself lots of segments to work with. Don't worry about including too many, you can ditch the ones you don't need.

Use the scaling command to shape the resulting cylinder by selecting first one, and then another "cut" or cylindrical section of points that define one of "segments" you extruded. When you're done shaping, if you included the end caps when you extruded, select and delete those faces.

Now you've got a one-sided fairing shape, all in one piece. Copy and paste into separate files the whole shape as many times as you want fairing pieces. In each copy, delete the faces by deleting points of the elements that you don't want in that piece of the fairing, so that when you put them back together, you'll have your full shape, only as separate pieces.

Now use the "extrude into 3-d" (my name) tool -- the little U-shaped tool to make the one-sided pieces have "depth".

Make sense?

 

[tl8]

I use basically a gmax clone for my fairings.

I have designed a top cap for any situation, it just needs to be scaled correctly.

Then I would create 2 cylinders: The outside cylinder is the faring outside. The inside is smaller than the outer by the thickness of the fairing.

I then subtract the inner from the outer and bob's your uncle.

Assemble in Mesh Wizard

 

[Zatnikitelman]

THANKS A LOT GREG! Your method worked perfectly!
Tl8, your method would work except Anim8or doesn't have any stupid boolean operations. It worked well with TurboCAD, except it screws up the normals.
THANKS!

 

[n122vu]

THANKS A LOT GREG! Your method worked perfectly!
Tl8, your method would work except Anim8or doesn't have any stupid boolean operations. It worked well with TurboCAD, except it screws up the normals.
THANKS!

**EDIT** I was under the impression anim8or had boolean subtraction functionality. I guess I was wrong.

 

[selden]

Boolean operations are available in Terranim8or, a 3rd-party utility for use with Anim8or models, but the results tend to have rough edges. The ones I've tried needed enough manual cleanup that it would have been faster to cut the holes manually.