This is Part One of the P51 project. This one we will focus on modeling the fuselage of the airplane. It is tricky because of the air scoop on the belly of this aircraft.

The first thing I did was tried to find as much reference on the P51 as I could. I found tons of photos but not many drawings (blueprint type). I did find plans for a balsa model of one though and it worked pretty well for my purposes.

download drawing here.

The first thing you will need to do is bring the drawing file into something like Adobe Illustrator, Freehand or something like that. Once you have it placed you will need to trace the lines that I have highlighted in the image below. These will be the splines we will need in Strata Studio Pro to make the fuselage.

Once you have these lines traced then we need to import them into Strata. I only made the outline of my lines red so that you can see which lines to trace. To import them to Strata you will need to save the lines without a fill or stroke to a Illustrator 7 .eps file. Once you have them imported they you will need to arrange them to look like the screen shot below. I duplicated the rib and sized it according to the outline splines.

Now that the ribs have been lined up and sized we can loose the outlining splines. This is were it gets a little tricky. Because the P51 has an air scoop on it's belly we will need to skin the nose section separate from the tail. To make a smooth joint between the two skinned sections you will need to duplicate the last spline of the nose and line it up with the first spline of the tail section. Like the image below. It will take some tweaking to get it to match up so be patient.

Now that you have the ribs all lined up and the nose and tail matching we can skin the ribs. Do the nose first. Make sure you have linear segments checked off in the "object properties" dialogue.

Before you skin the tail duplicate the last rib and set it aside for now. Now skin the tail. Make sure you don't skin the nose section to the tail. Make them two separate objects.

Now for the scoop. I made a spline that matched the curve of the underside of the plane and duplicated it three times and tweaked each on the make the shape of the scoop based on photos I found. Then I skinned them too. Like the images below. Then I lined it up. Sometimes the seams in this area won't match up perfectly but that's okay because the wing will end up covering it up.

Now for that last little spline I had you copy and save for later. Duplicate it again and then line them up. Make the last one almost closed. This will be the tapered end of the fuselage that the tail will "blend" into. Your image should look like the one below. Once you have this last little piece made then line it up with the end of the fuselage.

That's the end of Part One. You should have a model that looks something like this.

Next I will go over making the wings and tail section. Hope you liked it so far.

part 2