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3.2. SHAPING THE FUSELAGE 17
Now, how do these three views (top, side, and bottom) fit together? It all starts with the side
view—the left side view, in particular. The points that make up the left side are mirrored on the
right, similar to the way the half-slices of the Section tab’s cross-section view are mirrored to form
a complete slice. The middle, roughly horizontal line in the side view corresponds to the top- and
bottommost lines in the top and bottom views.
The top and bottom views are mirrored in their upper and lower halves; dragging a point in
the upper half of the top view will drag its corresponding point in the lower half of that view (in
addition to dragging the same point in the side view). They are mirrored like this because the left
side view itself is mirrored on the right; thus, the top view, for instance, shows the top half of both
the left and right sides.
Figure 3.10: A situation where the “reset to vertical” buttons are useful
At the top of the window are two buttons, Reset this section to vertical and Reset all
sections to vertical. Often in the course of editing the points of a fuselage, the points of a given
section will get out of alignment purely by accident, due simply to the inaccuracy of using a mouse.
That’s where these buttons come in. For instance, in the example fuselage in Figure 3.10, you
might want to click the Reset all sections to vertical button, thus lining up the points in each
cross-section.
However, in some cases, it is desirable to not have all your sections vertically aligned. In this
case, if you still wanted to align the out-of-whack section seen in Figure 3.10, you would need to
first click one of the points in the section you wanted to align. Then, after you have effectively
told Plane Maker which section you want to modify, you would click the Reset this section to
vertical button.
At the bottom of this window are buttons to load an image or clear it. This can be quite useful
for laying out your points properly. For instance, you could take two scale drawings of your aircraft
(one to be used in both the top and bottom views and one to be used in the side view) and drag
the radius points to match up with this image.
For instance, in Figure 3.11, we cut up two scale images to be the same size, with the center
of the image corresponding to the center of the fuselage, and loaded the images into Plane Maker.
From there, we simply dragged the outermost points (or uppermost points, as the case may be) to
match the edges of the fuselage in the image. Following that, we dragged the inner points to match
the known shape of the fuselage.