Hi,
How best to create the mattress effect as I call it, some call it oil can, on an aircraft of WW2 fuselage or wing skin.
If one looks at the side of the Battle of Britain Memorial Flight Lancaster or the one at East Kirkby you will see this effect.
I am aware of someone using Solidworks to create a similar aircraft then using Rhino to try and do that sinking in of the skin along rivet lines.
Can Solidoworks not manage such organic shapes, but Rhino not manage metal work.
Having to ‘cross prog’ such a build is a nuisance.
What would the procedure be in Rhino ?
I envisage a very shallow profile north south and east west per rectangle and fit surface to such, maybe one the rail the other the profile ?
Assume flat between rivets, being an inch apart !
I’d do it in the applied material, giving it a displacement map or bump map. I’d use a parametric material (e.g. Substance) so that I could apply random variations to make each panel individual. Applying the same image to every panel won’t look realistic but hand crafting each panel would be really boring.
SolidWorks is very limited in texture mapping, so you would have some advantage using Rhino. As Jeremy indicates, using a parametric map is the best method if it is only for rendering.
If you need to model those details, what is the reason? Modeling would be a massive effort regardless of the application.
Its a company producing an actual injection molded 1/48 polystyrene kit, so the tool being used to make the metal mold needs CAD data to control its etching of the mold.
Unfortunately that needs to be modeled if it is CNC machined to produce injection mold tooling. There is no easy method. An advantage of using SolidWorks to do this would be the the list of the individually modeled elements, and the ability to group them, in the Feature Tree. Using Blocks and Worksessions in Rhino might help keep elements organized better, over using layers alone.