Coloring one part multiple colors using lines

[heritagesurf7]

I have created a commercial airplane in Solidworks and I would like to finish it off in Photoview with a nice paint job. I was wondering if there was any way to just draw lines to define where a color ends, rather than having to extrude or cut in order to create a different surface.

The problem is once I made all of the cuts for the windows, I am not able to cross those cuts with additional cuts. So, for instance, I have all of my windows depressed .5in into the fuselage, and I cannot cut a long sweeping line along the fuselage so that the top half is a separate surface to paint white, and the bottom is separate and painted blue. Any ideas, or do I have to tediously cut around all of the windows?

 

[dgowans]

Can't you simply do a split surface operation along the entire length of the plane and split only the fuselage surface?

 

[EEnd]

I think what dgowans is suggesting is using a split line rather than cuts to create the separate surfaces.

Eric

 

[CorBlimeyLimey]

Or you could create a zero-offset (or maybe near zero) surface to represent the paint.

 

[heritagesurf7]

The problem I've run into in splitting is that, since I only want it to split the fuselage and tail, I need to roll back so it doesn't split through all of my parts. Then, when I roll foward, half of my rebuilds are incorrect since there is now a second body present, and any references to parts of the original body are destroyed.

So there is really no option of just drawing straight on the fuselage to indicate where the color should stop? I have to do some kind of cut/split/extrude/offset of a solid body. (My entire plane is solid bodies, not surfaces.

 

[dgowans]

There is a difference between a split operation and inserting a split line. You can control a split line to only divide the faces you want divided.

 

[heritagesurf7]

Ah got it, thank you. Now the last thing is that I did the curve split successfully on one wing. It won't let me do a feature mirror, so I decided to do a sketch mirror.

However, when I do "curve split" it does one wing right, and only parts of the second wing. Any idea why? It doesn't matter if I do both wings at once, or one wing at a time with two different splits. It is the same results every time. I've uploaded a picture. The blue lines are the curves I use to split the wing, and the image is rotates slightly so you can see both the curve and the actual splits