Hey Adam, a question came up regarding the type of reference drawings one would need to create a convincing model of this car in SolidWorks:
http://atspeedimages.com/search.php?s=Auto+Union+Type+C+V16+Streamliner
All I’ve been able to find are these rough drawings, including section cuts (not shown here):
The kind of wonky results I’m getting when trying to connect the sections using surface lofts suggest that more reference geometry is needed. But I think this kind of model could be constructed using a surface mesh modeler like Modo 501 which allows you to pull and push on the surface to get the geometry to look right, which you can’t really do in SW. What do you think?
It’s a bit crude, but it looks like someone already did it:
Hi Andrew!
You are absolutely correct: this form would be quite difficult to achieve in SW alone, but would be incredibly easy using a combination of SolidWorks with a mesh modeler like modo. tsElements to the rescue!
That said, the model could certainly be built in SolidWorks, albeit without as much control as I might like for a real ‘class-A’ solution. As I’m sure you found out through experimentation, a simple Lofted surface might seem like a logical approach for something like this in SW, but in practice it can be devilishy tricky to control. In practice you would actually create a form like this out of several independent surfaces.
Best,
Adam