World War Two Fighter Planes

Planes in the Set

• P-38 Lightning
• F4F Wildcat
• A6M5 "Zeke" (aka late War Zero)
• N1K2 "George"
• Focke Wulf 190 A-series

1/144th scale fighter planes from World War Two. I modified the Lightning and Zero to remove the propellers, so that the props look like they're flying, for use in miniature wargaming. I scaled the Focke Wulf 190 A. These are all low-poly models.

I designed the N1K2 "George" and the F4F Wildcat using schematic drawings from the Rand McNally Color Illustrated Guide to World War II Airplanes. I then scaled the model to 1/144th scale based on the stated length in the book. I'm still learning how to use Blender, so these models are a little rough.

If you have any requests for World War Two aircraft, let me know. I have reference schematics for almost every plane from the War.

Tip me with Bitcoin at the address below: 14U3VBvFWYwz5A6Rtox2PiWDfZFLFJpFtZ

How I Designed This

For the Japanese "George" aircraft, I first used a scanner to scan the schematic illustrations of the plane. Then I used GIMP (https://www.gimp.org/) to edit the scanned images to enhance the contrast and to trim the scanned page down to just the schematic drawing. See the image below.

Next, I opened Blender (https://www.blender.org/) to a clean work space. I added the schematic image as a background image three times ('N' to open the options panel, and then "Add Background Image"). I added one image in side view, one in top view, and one in front view, to match the perspectives from the schematic.

To see the image, you need to enter orthographic perspective ('5' on the numpad). I switched to side view ('3' on the numpad). Then I added a plane (not the flying kind...) to the workspace, rotated it 90 degrees around the Y-axis so it was visible. Then I dragged the vertices of the plane to match the silhouette of the "George," extruding extensions to the plane by selecting two vertices at a time.

After filling out the shape of the fuselage, I extruded the plane, switched to "Object" mode, added a mirror modifier, and started working from the other views (i.e. top and front). I extruded additional sections for the tail and wings.

I didn't worry about the scale of the model till the end. At the end, I looked up in my reference book for the length of the aircraft (30 feet, 8 inches). I converted to inches (368 inches), then converted to millimeters (by multiplying by 25.4 millimeters to the inch: 9,144mm), then divided by 144 to get the Y-dimension for the aircraft at 1/144th scale (63.5mm).

Category: Games