Plane Maker Tutorial Part 4

We will now do the fuselage and get rid of the red stripe at the bottom. We do not have any misc wing or pylons, so go into the fuselage tab adjust the bounding box as below and then press the grey reset button. Experiment with sliding the top and bottom horizontal edges and see how the grey cheat line moves up and down.

That completes the painting of the airframe, so now we just have the canopy, wheels and struts to go. It should now look like this.

The canopy is the first item under the misc' bodies tab, so like the fuselage, simply use the edit top button, draw the bounding square out and click the grey button. A word of warning, the box will not be apparent so you may need to look for that annoying very thin flashing red line and pull it out to the required size and position. This color box should have had opacity set to 50% and thus display in X-Plane as transparent. You may also choose your own preferred color but a tint does give it more definition when flying.

Ignore the rest and now go straight to the wheels and tires tab. For the wheel button find a thin flashing red line or a box and stretch it out to cover your wheel image.

Click the tire box and extend your box into any black area, it only needs to be small. Do likewise for the three legs onto the grey area.

So that's it, we are painted, with a see-through canopy.

Hopefully this has shown you the basics of how to create an aeroplane, however as we can see, it still has plenty of scope for detailed improvement. With a bit of shape shifting and engine changes it may even be ready to morph into one of these...

Once an aeroplane is painted and then flown, we can fine tune it. You may have already noticed it has ridiculously good short field take-off, even with full fuel, too good in fact! This means we have either overpowered it or underspecified its weight. I will therefore increase the start weight, fuel load and maximum weight as follows.

As well as the changes above, I have also shortened the last three fuselage sections by 3ft which required the tailplane assembly to be bought forward by 3ft and raised by 0.5ft because at rotation it was hitting the runway. This also necessitated moving CofG forward by 2ft (yours may have come out slightly different as no two aeroplanes are the same).