Hi guys, sorry it's been a long time since an update. My Mom died just before Christmas, and kind of lost my motivation.
Had done some work before that, started printing the rest of my 1/24th, and saw that some parts needed more decimation as the Photocentric printer can resolve them. Not that obvious, but I could see it.
Good news is 1.5mm walls are strong enough so much less resin is needed than I thought, this part was pretty flexible until it was UV cured but didn't want to break, it feels almost exactly like a model kit part.
I then drove myself mad with this section as it just didn't look right, I was unsure before but convinced myself it was just the way it looked as an isolated piece. Picked up a Firefox presskit off ebay with an original photograph of the pic in my avatar. It was much better resolution being an original, so it let me see the curvature from the panel lines more obviously. The top curve where it goes from the flat top to the sides was too tight a corner, fixed that and also noticed the front is wider that I had it where the canards are.
View attachment Firefox lobby pic.jpg
The photo matching in Sketchup then sent me down the rabbit hole for the past few days. I could not get the model to line up right. I hadn't done this since early on after I had the major dimensions worked out as the complexity of the model caused the software to go so slow or crash it was unusable. Turns out upgrading to an intel i7 and an Nvidia GTX970 helps, then removing the facet heavy exhausts and pilot from the file makes it almost snappy.
So turns out I had one major screw up that luckily was a relatively easy fix. The wing from the root to the end of the leading edge was too long shrunk that 2% and it all seems to line up. There are details to fix, have to rebuild the neck, AGAIN! as there is now a gap. Still checking the tailplane tilt as another degree made them line up better, but I think both models are a little off, I can see the right tailplane on the one is set further back than the other which I think is throwing the angle off.
Outer wings were a bit off shape and again a bit too big, shrunk/sized them, but require partial rebuild as it's screwed up the lateral panel lines. I misjudged the size as they needed to be angled down 2 degrees more.
So these are the model overlaid, thanks Martin for the pics, the one in the crate is good colour reference. but yes it is actually shades of grey in the other pic which looks like natural lighting.
Hard to get a complete match, there is always some lens distortion. I did play around with the lens correction feature of Photoshop on one pic, and it did seem to help maybe, but not knowing what lens was used it's a guessing game.
Oh in another good start to the year the tray in my Formlabs printer cracked in situ and leaked resin inside the whole printer, after a full strip-down and clean it miraculously still worked, then last week the laser expired. After some detective work including dremelling out the resin in the laser assembly (really don't want you looking inside) I think I can fix it.