Modeling a 3D plane

This post aims at explaining how modeling a 3D plane: the Supermarine Spitfire. It's a beautiful World War II English plane.

Modeling

I'm a complete novice in modeling. I have not taken any course on the subject. All I know is by reading some of the Freecad documentation, reading blog posts and watching some youtube videos. As a consequence, I might be completely off in my way of modeling.

For the modeling, I'll use Freecad (https://www.freecadweb.org/). It's a free, open-source software for modeling and available on linux.

The plane is split in 3 parts: body, wings and horizontal stabilizer (i.e. back wings).

3 pictures of the plane are used: one from the top, one from the side, and one from the front.

Front, top and side images used to draw the plane

Fuselage

The fuselage of the plane is sketched according to the 3 axis. Here the side sketch:

Once the side sketch is done, I can pad the sketch (i.e. filling it).

I repeat this process for the front image as well as the top image.

Once this is done, I compute the intersection of each modeling.

Intersection of top, front and side modeling

Wings

I do the same thing for the wings (only on 2 axis).

Horizontal stabilizer

I do the same thing for the horizontal stabilizer (only on 2 axis).

Whole plane

I then compute the union of the fuselage, wings and horizontal stabilizer.

That's it !

3D slicing

Once the modeling part is done, we need to print the piece.

To do that, we use a slicer, a software which converts a 3D object into printing instructions (a bit like a compiler transform code into machine instructions).

I'm using Cura which is probably the most well known slicer. I just need to export the .obj file from Freecad and importing it in Cura. We can tune many printing parameters whithin Cura.

In this case, Cura informs us that printing a plane of 13cmx18cmx2.6cm takes around 4 hours.