I'm modeling the Mercedes series of engines & will eventually wrap some planes around them. All modeling is done in Amapi 7.52 using nurbs to generate the final meshes. I plan to import the parts into Carrara 6.0 for rendering.
Many thanks are due to Franzkait for providing me with the information needed to get this far.
I started with the basic cylinder, which is a blend of two distinct profiles at 90 degree angles. This is best modeled as a Gordon surface, so I constructed a profile network --
and then (many trys later

) got a nice hull --
Here's the basic cylinder unit completed in nurbs --
And with some shading on it so it looks a little more solid --
With that much done, it's easy to rough out some top ends to get an idea of what they'll look like; here's a Mecedes D.IIIa --
Continued in the next post.