My latest model; it will eventually have a full interior including the huge cargo bay, opening doors & ramps, working landing gear and internal cabins. The ship is intended for a short film project that will combine live action video with the CG elements. The shuttle would be capable of carrying passengers as well as cargo, partly due to the enormous internal volume that blended wing body shapes have. NASA, Boeing and Airbus have all been studying such shapes for future cargo planes and eventually for airliners. I decided to take it a bit further into the future for my design and make it a spacecraft.
Just in case it helps somebody I’m not only going to build this ship I am going to document how I do things. The basic shape was laid down using a subdivision surface modifier to make modelling simpler. Once the basic shape was done I applied it and started polygon modelling for the landing gear, which at the moment is a separate set of mesh objects. Hopefully more images later this evening as I am just about to start work on the main landing gear.
And here is this evening’s meagre progress. Spent more time than I would like making parts that I ended up deleting. In the end it looks credible enough if unfinished. It does need a little more detail even though it isn’t going to be seen in extreme close up. It was all done by extruding from circles and rectangles, building up polygons where they are needed and then in some cases using bevels to round edges. More bevels may be needed before the model is done, it depends how it looks when rendered from the viewpoints that will be used in the final shots.
I like when artists document the steps and progress. It is good for learning new stuff.
Where are the air intakes for the engines?
If I was a trillionaire this would make an awesome private plane. Would be extra expensive though due to Rule of Wealth #1: Be sure you can land your plane on your yacht.
No air intakes, as in the story it has rocket propulsion for use in space and gravity manipulation for when it is close to a planet. So for take off and landing it would use batteries, in space when away from a planet it would use the rockets.
As for that last part, you’d need a hell of a yacht! This shuttle has a wingspan just over 70 metres; an Airbus A-380 is just over 79 metres but of course the blended wing/body shape has a much greater internal volume. You might be better just using the shuttle as the personal yacht…
Here are some renders showing the landing gear folding mechanisms. These are very simple to rig, just add a rotation constraint to the main leg, and parent the hydraulic ram to the leg. The hydraulic ram has a “track to” constraint that makes it point at the hydraulic cylinder, which in turn has a “track to” constraint that makes it point at the hydraulic ram. The hydraulic cylinder is parented to the main body of the shuttle and everything now works nicely. I have yet to set up the nose-wheel steering but that will come soon. Next I will build the landing gear bays and doors and UV Map all that. After that I will work on making the tyres more realistic, which will include proper mapping and textures.
My plan to buy decommissioned aircraft carriers and combine them into one hyper-carrier should be enough. Hmm, use the shuttle as a yacht. Good idea! Water take off and landing and cruising. Then I can spend more on private islands and I won’t need an airstrip on them.
NOTE: What the … ! There is the "being edited in another window bug again! The system keeps interrupting me saying this is being edited in another window. It makes almost impossible to post anything. Will report in bug section … if I can.
OK, didn’t get much time this weekend for this project, too many deadlines looming. I did get the tyres textured and some work done for the landing gear doors.
Just to let people know, I have not abandoned this but it has to stay untouched for a while because I have paying work that has to come first. Once the current work project is done my hours will be sane once more and I will do more personal work. This will not be restarted straight away as I am going to finish something else first, because it’s a smaller project so I can finish it much more quickly. I estimate I’ll get back to this shuttle by the end of July.
Cargo aircraft do not have windows in the bay area. Only on emergency exit doors. This is evident even on passenger DC10’s converted for cargo use.
The dreamlifter is an exception to this as it has slightly more passenger space than a “regular” cargo 747 (that and the passenger space also had to be moved to the lower level for the height enlarged cargo bay).
Nonetheless, if the lower level is the cargo area, I’d ditch the last 8 windows and reduce the first 7 to maybe 2 or 3
There won’t be any windows in the cargo area. There is a large central cuboid planned to be the cargo bay, with a rear ramp and doors. Above and to both sides are passenger and crew areas, extending into the forward edges of the wings. The windows at the leading edges of the wings are where the restaurant and bar areas are placed, to give a good view as you cruise from Earth to Mars or wherever. The vast volume of the wings means that if only the leading edge areas are used for passengers and crew there is plenty of space for a huge amount of fuel in the shape.
The vast internal volume is the biggest advantage of the blended wing-body shapes. Inside this model is room for more cargo than an An-224 could carry and more passengers than an Airbus A-380 could accommodate. This still leaves space for massive amounts of machinery and fuel to power it into the sky.
Well once you mention this is a combi plane, well all “conventional” designs get thrown out