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44 3. SHAPING THE BODY OF AN AIRCRAFT
really makes sense to create the pylons after you have created the engines themselves, as described
in the section “Creating the Engines” of Chapter 4.)
Modeling a pylon is very similar to modeling a wing—a pylon just ends up being a short,
stubby, oddly shaped wing, which might itself be attached to a real wing. In light of this, the
controls found in the Engine Pylons dialog box are identical to those in the Wings dialog box, with
a couple exceptions. For information on using the standard wing controls, see the section “Shaping
the Wings” above.
Figure 3.44: An Airbus A380’s engine pylon (thanks to Wikimedia Commons user David.Monniaux
for the photo)
The most important thing to note is that unlike in the creation of a wing, each pylon is place with
respect to the engine to which it is (assumedly) attached—it is not placed relative to the aircraft’s
reference point. Since engines in Plane Maker are just points from which thrust is generated, this
works well.
Figure 3.45: The “engine has pylon” checkbox