Biplane Wing Covering Technique

Support Modeling
1

I’m interested in modeling an Antonov An-2 biplane, and I feel fairly confident I can model most of it. However, one area that I think is important but I’m not quite sure how to do is the area where the skin of the aircraft meets the ribs.

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If you look at the underside of the wing in this image, it’s somewhat defined where the ribs are beneath the skin, but not overly obvious. How would I get that effect?

Thanks for your help in advance!

2

This isn’t exactly the same because this is supposed to be more like cloth, but what I did was a combination of two things:

  1. Make edges on the wings where each rib edge is, and mark them as sharp. Then make an edge inbetween the two and scale it a tiny bit smaller:

wing.PNG
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wings04.PNG
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  1. For texturing, make a bump map with each rib emphasized a little (and in my case added bumps for the threads):

snipe09
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It all depends on just how subtle you want the effect to be. Hope this is helpful!

3

Wow that’s a really good example thank you! I appreciate it.

4

Impressive!