Research On Virtual Sculpture For Aircraft Conceptual Design

Virtual sculpture is one of the key parts of virtual reality. It mainly focuses on the conceptual design in product development. Virtual sculpture is featured as direction and in-definition for interaction. There is a lot of duplicated work for re-building the model of the proposed conceptual aircraft as the layout is often changed in the conceptual design. Several mature CAD design methods used in aircraft conceptual design have many problems at present. By the introduction of the virtual sculpture into the aircraft conceptual design, designers can rapidly re-shape the aircraft and reduce the work in this phase.Firstly, the tasks in aircraft conceptual design were described in this thesis. The virtual sculpture and the relevant technologies including virtual reality and virtual design were discussed. The strategy and architecture of the virtual environment were proposed. The virtual device and software development environment which were used to perform the research were presented. Secondly, the curve and surface theory was presented and the surface model in CATIA including relative classes and model in CAA were discussed. At last, the research of the key fundamentals of curved surface was focused. By the use of the development tool of CAA, an aircraft layout model on CATIA platform is created and the curved surface modification in the proposed virtual environment is given. The implementation of those functions lays a foundation for further study of creating free-form surface by paste-model in virtual environment.