I am currently working on a dio..and i want to make a 1/48 scale plane appear "in flight" Can anyone give me any ideas on how i would go about mounting the plane to make it appear..in the air.."in flight"?

Thanks in advance

Mary (++)

Hi Mary!

The first thing you should tell us is if you plane will be propeller driven or a jet... maybe this could help "in flight" model specialist to answer you. Unfortunately I never build a model of an aircraft "in flight", so I won't be of great help...

By the way, is your "Amphibs" Schwimmwagen on the way?

Jean-Luc

If your doing a jet a piece of clear rod in an afterburner might work if your making a shadowbox. if its low level
run the rod up a tree ( saw this with a huey model somewhere it was prety cool)

tree

Hi Mary,

Will the diorama be omniviewing, or forced perspective? If the later, you can try a vertical sheet of plexiglas to affix the 'dark side' of the plane to. Otherwise, clear rod will have to do.

Is the airplane just taking off or full flight? By and large, this is a tricky diorama to pull off.

Thanks guys for your comments thus far..The plane i will be using is a 1/48 Messerschmit. The pattern of flight will be an ascending one..flying up from behind and over a building. Hope this explains a little better.

Thanks for any ideas guys...

Mary (++)

Perhaps you can "mask it" so as to blend into the building ? I just used the tree to partly mask the rod holding the Mustang.



Of course that doesn't work from all angles

I tried this once, and it may not fit your tastes, but here goes.

I did an in-flight of an He 111 torpedo bomber at low level and I used the smallest diameter of brass tubing I could get away with for a rigid support.

I guesstimated from a variety of viewing angles what areas of the tubing support were going to be against what areas (the ocean base, open air, underside of the Heinkel) and painted the exposed tubing in the appropriate shades including a neutral gray for the open-air zone.

It wasn't a perfect solution, but I actually preferred it in that case to using clear rod because it seemed to fool the eye a bit better on first glance.

This is coming from a middle-age nearsighted man with bifocals, of course :-)

Just my 5 cents worth (inflation and gas prices, you know).

Mike Still

I agree on the clear rod... You would think it would hide itself better, but I personally think it stands out more. I've never tried to hide the support myself, but I've seen it done pretty well by others. I don't think there's any way you can hide it perfectly... But the best few I saw involved a forced perspective. The people arranged the model in the scene so there were things around it that forced you to look from an angle that didn't give a very good view of the support. And then they just painted the support to blend in with the nearest thing.

You could also do a shadow box type of thing, which would force people to look from one angle.

Dave
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http://eje.railfan.net/dpdp/