The P40 cockpit project.

People who know I've been building this have been asking to see how I built the (very notional) Curtiss P40 cockpit rear intend to use in some of my stories. Well, here it is....

102421_0076 by Gary Menten, on Flickr

Cockpit rear with Laura


It doesn't look like much, does it?

But when extracted from the background using Photoshop and inserted into 3D render like the one below.....

10b by
Gary Menten, on Flickr



It actually ends up looking like this....

Laura_1 by
Gary Menten, on Flickr


And for my money, the composite ends up looking a whole load better than in previously created images where photographed the figure in front of my computer screen.

If you're tempted to ask why bother building the cockpit at all and why not just do a figure extraction and paste just the figure into the render, the answer is that it is a whole lot easier and faster to do an extraction of the whole cockpit rear including the figure than it is to do just the figure as the fuselage of the aircraft is constitutes a series of smooth lines, some straight, some curved where as the figure with its complex pose, and worst of all, it's hair would take significant amounts of time to extract from background.

Please feel free to ask my any questions you might have about how I built or or the materials used.

Great work Gary, it's looks so real when added into Daz3D! Looking forward too seeing you make use of it.

Looks pretty cool.

That looks great! Your reasons for making an actual physical cockpit make sense, and it increases the realism.

Nice! Actually in movies we mostly see either the face of the pilot in the cockpit or the planes from the outside, so you have endless potential with the backgrounds. You could also physically add the three beams on the model to have authentic shadows on the character even.

I think I have 1 or 2 tomahawks in 1:72 lying around from early teenage years. Didn't you also use physical model planes in some stories?

Ovy wrote:Nice! Actually in movies we mostly see either the face of the pilot in the cockpit or the planes from the outside, so you have endless potential with the backgrounds. You could also physically add the three beams on the model to have authentic shadows on the character even.

I think I have 1 or 2 tomahawks in 1:72 lying around from early teenage years. Didn't you also use physical model planes in some stories?

Unfortunately, adding the canopy frame would require a supporting structure at the front precisely matching the curvature of the rear cockpit bulkhead. The engineering effort involved in trying to bend brass bar stock to that exact shape defied my best efforts.

The P40 is one of my favorite aircraft of WWII, and much underrated. It's primary weakness was the lack of a two-stage, two-speed supercharger, thus giving it poor high altitude performance. This was the result of pre-war US thinking, where the US military was not expecting to fight an overseas war and as a consequence believed that the aircraft would need to be optimized for coastal defense and low and medium altitudes. As a result, the P40 could outperform the vaunted P51 Mustang in virtually every aspect; acceleration, roll and turn rate, climb and dive below 10,000 feet and 250 mph.

ThePhotogsBlog wrote:The engineering effort  involved in trying to bend brass bar stock to that exact shape defied my best efforts.

Why brass? If you make it removable (just for photo ops) then the front can be made of anything really as long as it is something for the beams to rest on, no?

Diana wrote:

ThePhotogsBlog wrote:The engineering effort  involved in trying to bend brass bar stock to that exact shape defied my best efforts.

Why brass? If you make it removable (just for photo ops) then the front can be made of anything really as long as it is something for the beams to rest on, no?

It has to be curved to the shape of the canopy and hold it's shape, that means it needs to be metal strip, not plastic. Could be copper or aluminum also, but brass is more common and what I have in stock.
P40 Warhawk_1 by Gary Menten, on Flickr

That's really ingenious and very practical too.