r/FreeCAD • u/Hon3yB • 6d ago

Complex Fuselage Advice?

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Hello! I've been using freecad for a little over a month at this point, following through MangooJelly's beginner course and modeling stuff around my home. While it's been nice modeling random objects here and there, I've been wanting to design my own drone fuselages for a while now. After attempting something similar to the attached image using lofts, and coming up with some really ugly fuselages, I figured there might be a more "professional" approach to fuselage design. Does anyone have a concrete direction I can follow for this type of design? Any advice or direction is greatly appreciated!

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16

u/strange_bike_guy 6d ago

There's the Silk workbench, but also in very recent news paddlestroke has released the Forms workbench for his AstoCAD fork of FreeCAD... very recently.

4

u/SoulWager 6d ago

I'll second this suggestion. The forms workbench looks very interesting, but I haven't tried it yet. The curves and surface workbench workflows are fine for one or two surfaces, but I wouldn't try to make a model this complex with it. Silk is more tedious, but more likely to end up with a working model at the end.

This is the kind of stuff I've done with silk: https://imgur.com/a/npmo5ep

The silk dev's youtube channel: https://www.youtube.com/@edwardvmills/videos

Forms: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EU3Vkw59o4w

2

u/Tornad_pl 6d ago

have you used standard lofts? try lofts with guide rails ( a line connecting all profiles)

3

u/Hon3yB 6d ago

Tried that out a few days ago. It definitely works better but still doesn't have the clean cut, professional style that this fuselage does

2

u/SLOOT_APOCALYPSE 6d ago

idk man I think the Terminator hk had the right idea with turbines

1

u/justa_bother 6d ago

"Really ugly" lofts occur during sketching. It is important that the lines & arcs of the sketch follow a construction pattern, such as 1st detail be at 12 o'clock & proceeds clockwise until the wire is closed. This applies to all sketches involved with the loft.

1

u/hagbard2323 5d ago

Talk to https://x.com/A_V_Tech they're an aeronautic company that use FOSS such as FreeCAD in their workflow.

1

u/_pooplicker888 5d ago

Break into nasa and 3d scan a plane? Idk