Douglas DC-4

No worries on the triangle count. If needed those of us with slower PC's can just fly it on a photofield. But thanks for trying to keep it down.
 
technoid said:
I think the DC-4 will need more triangles than the Clipper because the landing gear and wheels will take more triangles than the floats did. So I went back to see if I could get rid of any more polygons on the back of the engines where you can't see them in the cowl. I ended up recovering another 3,408 triangles that you can't see so that will help create the gear. To get the tires and wheels to look nice and round takes a lot of triangles to add more segments, and there's four of them on the main gear. I want to keep the total triangle count around the same as the Clipper which I'm not sure I'll be able to do with four 9 cylinder radials. I could end up needed to make them 7 cylinder radials.
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You could do the engines as propellers thing I told you about years ago.
 
legoman said:
You could do the engines as propellers thing I told you about years ago.
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I looked at the directions but being honest they were confusing to me so I never tried it. But at the same time that doesn't change the rendering load so the frame rate hit should be the same either way. I do have 135,000 triangles so I think that's enough I just didn't want to use that many so the frame rate hit would be lower.
 
technoid said:
I looked at the directions but being honest they were confusing to me so I never tried it. But at the same time that doesn't change the rendering load so the frame rate hit should be the same either way. I do have 135,000 triangles so I think that's enough I just didn't want to use that many so the frame rate hit would be lower.
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I whipped up a moki that can be plopped on any model.
 

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Bummer I ran into a problem. I've been using two drawings for the DC-4. One drawing is what you see in the side shots which is a nice looking drawing of a Pan American DC-4. The second drawing is a 3-View that's a bit grainy but it's by W. A. Wylam so I'm sure it's the most accurate. I assumed both drawings from the side would be the same but they're not. I say that because today I duplicated the 3-View drawing three times and rotated them in place so I'd be using the same drawing for all three views. But the cockpit area doesn't match so I need to go back and rework it a bit. Oh well I should have been using the same drawing for all three views from the beginning, so live and learn I guess.
 
Well I decided to start working on the landing gear. I haven't done much so there's still lots of work to do.
 

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I think this is what I'm going with. It isn't scale but what I did was use a picture of a set of DC-4 gear for a model plane and made something very close to it. So it's not scale but I think it's reasonable for my plane.
 

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The main strut diameter seemed a bit small for the DC-4 gear so I made it larger. I also increased the diameter of the small cylinder going up the angled strut. That cylinder represents a spring but I didn't want to use all the triangles it takes to make a coiled spring. Here's a side by side so you can see the modified gear. The gear with the changes is on the left. If you have a preference let me know I saved both so it's easy to switch them out.

I know the main strut on the real gear forks at the top I was just saving some triangles. I can always modify it later if I have triangles left. Actually I'm trying to keep the triangle count down there's plenty of triangles at 135,000 I just want to keep it as close to 105,000 as possible to keep the frame rate up higher in RF-X.
 

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  • Douglas DC-4 22.jpg
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Okay there's always room for one last tweak. This is the same as the one on the left side of the last picture with these minor changes. The bottom part of the main strut was a tiny bit smaller than I thought it should be after I made the top part larger last time so I increased the diameter of just the bottom part 5 percent and increased the center part of the axle the same amount. I also made the end parts of the scissors in the back at the bottom a tiny bit narrower. So not much just tiny tweaks to finish it off. So this should be it I guess the nose gear will be next.
 

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I added the nose gear today. Like always it's not scale but it has some scale elements.
 

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BrokeDad said:
Close is good enough for this. I'm sure plenty of tweaks remain for you to ponder in the coming weeks :)
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Yeah for some reason close is good enough for me on landing gear I spent my triangles on four radial engines. I like the gear to look better than typical RC stick gear and these have enough details to look at. And like you said I can tweak them later if I want too. Ha.. most often I do tweak things before release.
 
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