Seats

At last, the crew has somewhere to sit!

The Comet’s 1940s cockpit might be old-fashioned compared with aircraft designed ten years later, with their plastic-panelled, Ezi-Wipe™ surfaces, but it doesn’t mean it wasn’t comfortable. Unlike musty-smelling exhibits in most museums, XV-814’s warm, dry and beautifully restored cockpit reeks of leather and opulence. Red leather in predominantly green surroundings enhances it British sports-car feel, and it was a very cozy place for the crew.



Getting the complex curves of the seat shells to look right took far too long. They don’t shout “leather” at the moment, but they will once I’ve added leather textures.



I spent inordinate amounts of time on the arm-rests, too, which pivot in an extraordinary way to park round the back of the seat; something you’re really grateful for when clambering around the real thing. You can just about make out a thin red thread, which is the axis of rotation. Foolishly, I forgot to measure a real seat, and the overall proportions and curvature of mine are not quite right. That made the armrest very difficult indeed. The compromise between the down position, the parked position, and the axis was one of those endless loops, adjusting each thing in turn until I got it right.

I’m not sure they’ll ever be animated in my 3D cockpit, but the point is they could be (at least, that’s how I’m justifying the work to myself, at the moment ...)



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GMM-P (08/10/2008)

Tags: Cockpit