As with my previous article, ViaCAD Pro was used for this short tutorial, but many other vendors offer similar products with the same capabilities.

If you are interested in trying out this package, there is 14 day trial available. It is fully functional, so you won't be missing any of the features:

https://www.punchcad.com/viacad-v11-free-trial

https://www.punchcad.com/blog/post/getting-started-with-viacad-training-videos

As well as ViaCAD above, there is also SketchUp and Blender, and you can find links to both of these well known and highly respected programs here:

https://www.sketchup.com/

https://www.blender.org/

In this second tutorial, we will be looking at how to create wheel wells and matching doors.

Working in 2D mode, first create an outline of an engine nacelle; here I have offset it from the axis origin, so you can see, it must be moved back.

Moving to the 3D mode, you will notice that there is lathe tool. Use the baseline as the lathe axis, to get this (I pulled flat face out a bit).

Now duplicate the solid and add a suitable shaped cutout solid to match the 2D plan of the doors.

Cut each from the other, leaving these two solids. The left over former curves and lines may be deleted.

Now extract a copy of the curved face off the block.

Thicken the face into a solid and position the left over block to cut it from the door solid (use the axis origin for correct alignment).

Finally, mirror the half door and position both so as to get a view.

If all went well, you should have 3 separate objects, with each one requiring texturing and exporting to X-Plane's OBJ8 format. The doors can be animated separately so as to fold in their required lateral angle of rotation. If you want your 'theoretical' hinge to be precise, then it's important to get the axis origin centered at the required rotation point of the object.

For this procedure, I had to export to SketchUp and use the SketchUp2XPlane plugin from Marginal:

https://marginal.org.uk/x-planescenery/tools.html

This works best for objects initially created in CAD.

I hope you enjoyed this short tutorial.

Ray Hill
www.rayhillwrites.com