1:60 scale Boeing 777 made from manila folders

What an insanely beautiful model. It makes me happy to think that humans find the time to do things that have no value beyond their beauty and the pleasure they give to people who work on them.

Second time I link to this video this month, but Sir Roger Scruton has a truly impactful message on this subject: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bHw4MMEnmpc

Can't find one without Portuguese subtitles, so hope that's OK

Scruton seems primarily preoccupied with dour gatekeeping over what should be considered beautiful or what should be aspired to, as though beauty were some objectively measurable quantity, and anything he deems "ugly" was deliberately crafted to annoy him.

No! He is defending the impetus of artists to use beauty as a motivator for their works. He is not diminishing the subjective variations in different cultural beauties, or claiming only one kind of beauty exists. The problem is that modern Western art no longer considers beauty itself a motivator. And that’s a problem because beautific recognition is a deeply human need.

That's also a bad point, there's more beautiful art being created today than ever. But many other artists have different motivations. If Scruton is saying that only beautiful art should be produced than "dour gatekeeping" seems appropriate.

> there's more beautiful art being created today than ever.

Except there’s not. Where is the Notre Dame of our time? The Mozart (who was well recognized in his time)? Who can be compared in our time to the sheer talent of Michelangelo? Who still produces ballets like Swan Lake?

Yes, we have beautiful art in our time, but you have to be blind to not see the difference in the sheer majesty and scale of pre modern Western art. It’s exponentially better.

I don’t know how you could possibly objectively claim that pre-modern western art is “exponentially better.”

Are The Beatles not as significant as Mozart?

Ultimately, it is up to the eye or ear of the beholder: I neither like the Beatles nor Mozart. Give me some Polka and I'm happy.

While there may be differences in skill of the composers and musicians, that is largely irrelevant. Art only is if it is appreciated. Complexity and skill without any appreciable quality is busywork. However, appreciation of the masses comes with hitting the average taste.

I don’t think an ability to hit the lowest common denominator is necessarily an indicator of artistic value. What is considered “high art” or “refined and complex” is often partially a function of class distinctions and access. The Beatles could’ve been treated like a symphony in a different context, as silly as that may sound.

Video games come to mind. There are some indie games that are, quite frankly, beautiful works of art. Outer Wilds comes to mind, as does Celeste.

Falco expressed one of the definitive opinions on this question in 1985: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cVikZ8Oe_XA. ("Rock me Amadeus.")

Usually people who say things like this have made zero effort to discover contemporary art that they like. You list examples of old European art that can be found in a 7th grade textbook.

Contemporary art is very hard to discover because society had so little time to filter and decide what it liked. That's why old art seems so much better-categorized in hindisght.

I agree. Just like other old things that are still around, old art seems good due to survivorship bias. There has been lots of terrible art made in all media since the beginning of civilization.

What about film making, TV, photography or even computer games? They sometimes have scale and majesty. Just with a different funding model than a few rich benefactors.

The burj khalifa is vastly more impressive than the notre dame from an architectural perspective.

Any of the top 100 movies on imdb can stand its own as far as capturing the imagination and delivering enjoyment as any of the great symphonies of old.

Modern art is different, but it is not inferior. I would argue today’s art vastly exceeds any period in history in scale and imagination. And beauty, well, that’s a personal matter.

Would you argue traditional japanese sword forging produced superior weapons to today’s because nobody makes swords that way anymore?

> The burj khalifa is vastly more impressive than the notre dame from an architectural perspective.

Seriously? Or are you being deliberately provocative? As I understand it the Burj is considered pretty vulgar.

For music I'd argue that the present mode of the classical tradition lies mostly in film and video scores. Your Mozart is quite possibly, and in all seriousnous, likely John Williams. Many of the notable classical composers of the first 2/3 or so of the 20th century did work in film.

You mention Mozart but neglect J.S. Bach, who was all but forgotten before being later revived; much of his catalog was lost. Michelangelo produced validating propaganda for the upstart and brutal Medici family. Much classical art (painting, sculpture, music) was similarly created for religious or state sponsors.

Ballet and opera were the most complex performative works of their time. You'd probably want to look to musicals for modern equivalents, combining drama, music, singing, and dance.

Signature buildings are harder to name, but then, they also often take centuries to earn their reputations, and are often dismissed or unappreciated for long periods. The Notre Dame cathedral only started becoming a classic in the 19th century, nearly 800 years after it was begun.

Among contenders I'd offer: Sagadra Familia in Barcelona, Spain (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sagrada_Família), National Cathedral in Washington, DC (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Washington_National_Cathedral), the Baháʼí House of Worship in Wilmette, IL)(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baháʼí_House_of_Worship_(Wilme...), and Sydney Opera House (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sydney_Opera_House), and the Empire State Building in New York (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Empire_State_Building), would be five suggestions.

In most cases, it's familiarity and time which cement reputations and acceptence. There's a timelessness IMO in stone, brick, and wood which concrete, steel, and glass match with difficulty, making other possible contenders -- most skyscrapers, bridges, and dams, say, less qualified, despite numerous contenders (e.g., Brooklyn & Golden Gate bridges, Hoover Dam, Burj Khalifa, Guggenheim Museum).

Reading between the lines, I think what he was arguing for was a distinction between art for the sake of beauty and art for other purposes. Lumping them all together under the same definition is problematic

Yes, I’m regards to what gets produced there’s an awful lot of beautiful art these days.

There is also a line of criticism that the institutions of fine art (education, galleries, museums, grants, etc) have, in the last few decades, distorted their previous value system of beauty (complex as it is) to focus on more conceptual and academic issues. If you’re interested in hearing this analysis in detail, check out The Invisible Dragon by Rich Hickey.

https://www.publishersweekly.com/978-0-9637264-0-7

Dave Hickey. I double-took for a moment there :)

Oh shucks! Thank you, it gets me every time

The banana taped to a wall comes to mind.

...and also likely more deliberately demoralising and horrific art being created today than ever.

Here it is without subtitles: https://www.bitchute.com/video/tGHVq8p2kSpq/

Is there a summary or could someone summarise the message for those who cannot watch the video at the moment?

This is the summary on the bitchute link:

Prof. Roger Scruton presents a provocative essay on the importance of beauty in the arts and in our lives.

In the 20th century, Scruton argues, art, architecture and music turned their backs on beauty, making a cult of ugliness and leading us into a spiritual desert.

Using the thoughts of philosophers from Plato to Kant, and by talking to artists Michael Craig-Martin and Alexander Stoddart, Scruton analyses where art went wrong and presents his own impassioned case for restoring beauty to its traditional position at the center of our civilization.

Since we are on this forum, I'll take a bite:

Carousels need to die. Everyone hates them, no one interacts with them unless they have to. The carousel doesn't work for the user and it doesn't work for the product.

http://shouldiuseacarousel.com/

https://www.dgtlnk.com/blog/website-carousel/

The plane model is nice.

When you have a team of designers who can't agree on which image to put on the frontpage, the dreaded carousel is frequently the result. The more bitter their disagreement, the shorter the timeout on the slideshow.

Designers? From my experience as a designer, it's almost never the actual designer who wants it. It's competing stakeholders.

Another designer here. My experience is the same as the sibling comment: I have never known a carousel to be the result of two designers disagreeing.

Tip for this site: disable javascript. It falls back to just a big list of photos which you can browse at your leisure.

If you're somehow forced in to using a carousel, at the very least, make it so that it stops auto-changing once I've interacted with the arrows. There's nothing worse than having to repeatedly click the back arrow to just look at a single photo.

I was confused with the previous comment until I read your reply :) I disable javascript by default.

I actually enjoyed this one, surprisingly. It kept me from staring too long on any one particular piece ;)

Image carousel is 21st century slideshow, which are cliched as a hated imposition.

What's wrong with a carousel? Its purpose is to take up space and look nice. No one is meant to click through them, it serves the exact same purpose as an ellipsis, the illusion that there's more content, more examples, etc...

Upon first reading, I thought this meant baggage claim carousels

I was thinking amusement park carousels! Seems like some kind of Rorschach test..

You both obviously do not do front-end development.

The carousel here serves as a secondary accompaniment to the main article text though. The fact that most people won't look through the pictures is only a bug if you actively care that people look at them. For content that's included in more of a "some people might want to look through this" manner, the carousel feels natural.

Huh, did not know this. I was just going to implement Carousel as an option in my editor!

About your second link, is there a site that gives general advice on UI/UX based on A/B statistics?

Although I don't really like them, http://shouldiuseacarousel.com/ is made bad on purpose ... I have never seen one that bad actually. What I hate most about them is usually the ads, but in that case it is that it doesn't let me read at my pace (which is a lot worst).

> http://shouldiuseacarousel.com/ is made bad on purpose...

Really? I don't like them either, but what's specifically bad about this? It's among the least-bad implementations of a carousel I've seen:

* Next/Previous buttons so I can override the timing

* Auto-progression timer resets when you click next/previous

* Loops round to the beginning when you reach the end and click "next"

* Has a clickable progress-indicator underneath, so you can skip by >1

In fact the only "fault" I can find in it is that I can't swipe left/right on a touchscreen - and that's defensible as a stylistic choice (to prevent accidental motion), given the presence of the next/prev buttons.

For one, timing isn't scaled to reading length of the texts.

Yep, it's better than the one used in OP's link.

Like other generalizations, this is not absolute. Carousels have their place. I used one recently on a simple site which has three nouns in the name. Three small SVG icons scrolling in a carousel fit the theme.

However, I agree that they are terrible where a gallery of thumbnails would be more suitable. The controls and auto scroll always seem to be cross-purpose.

On boring websites, yea. But on Steam, I have definitely bought games after scrolling through that carousel.

Steam doesn't use a carousel, it has a gallery with thumbnails. Those two are not the same thing.

I can't post images here to prove my point, but if the front-page of the steam store is not a carousel, then I don't know what is.

I'm on mobile, and honestly the only problem I found with the carousel here is that it's actually too small; full screen height would be better. (This may be an issue with my use of Materialistic, some css and js don't work well with it)

On mobile, whether the article is long or not, it's nice being able to quickly scroll back to a section of text to find something you read previously; if there's 25 pictures in the way, that gets obnoxious quickly, and I'm more likely to just leave.

Having a carousel means the user can see all the pictures (used to good effect with overviews and varying levels of detail/zoom/cutout); scroll horizontally (or tap icons, but scrolling would be better) for more images and vertically for more text. A way to improve this one would be to make it an embed that can enlarge itself to take up the full screen and restyle itself vertically or horizontally; I know I've seen this functionality somewhere, possibly a php image hosting script.

Building paper airplane models was a very popular hobby in Israel (and probably other countries) during the 1960's. Each issue of the Israeli Air Force Journal came with a model which you would painstakingly cut and glue. Here are some examples of what these models looked like: http://starry-side.com/wpe/wordpress/index.php/2019/08/08/ol... Of course, this guy is on a whole different level of detail and dedication (plus he designs everything himself). Amazing work.

Was also very popular in communist era Poland, including people extending the paper models to be capable of self-propelled taxiing and certain set of "moveable" features implemented as extras.

Same thing in Bulgaria. One good side of "communism" was free modeling clubs for kids like me, so we've got rocket modelling (made 2, even 3 phase rockets while 3rd-4th grade), plane modelling (balsa wood, rice paper, etc.) - all for free - you pay for neither materials, nor courses, later it was computers (that's how I got into them). Before that also slot cars racing, ship modelling, there was even knot-making club (our city is on the black sea, so makes sense - future sailors!)

I mean, even if communism is evil, there were some good things - way overpay, or pay anything for clubs that should've been free to begin with and get kids into them... It doesn't take much to support them compared to many other things...

Czech Republic, reporting in! I'm too young to remember much of communism but I remember the balsa and rice paper gliders I built with my grandpa very fondly. There's something so fantastic about the fragile beauty of those planes with their skeletons visible beneath that translucent skin.

There's a magazine in the Czech Rep. called ABC which always had plans for some sort of papercraft model in the back. I used to love them as a kid.

https://www.abicko.cz/kategorie/6333/navody-z-abc

Mały Modelarz, right?

Yes, exactly.

I also had a book about techniques to use when building planes from such cut outs, and it included a chapter on "extras" like putting lights, small electric engines, etc. into the plane which sometimes allowed enough power that they would taxii on the table :)

I have PDFs of some of these Israeli model kits. If anyone is interested LMK and I'll post them somewhere.

I'm interested. LMK if you end up posting them. Thanks for sharing.

Here are the links for these files at archive.org. I have the actual files too in case any of these links have stopped working.

http://web.archive.org/web/20040607002835/http://www.iafe.ne...

The links work. Thank you!

Request - any books/articles anyone can recommend on the human mind's instinctive need to become obsessed with something? Periodically, like many others, my mind becomes obsessed with something and I need to learn/build until it ceases to be interesting which can range from days to years. Like hoarding, I think there's probably an evolutionary drive in this, but curious if there are good resources to better understand the different attributes of wanting to learn/do something to 'irrational' levels of details whether it's something seemingly inconsequential or consequential, which seems irrelevant to this human drive. So much joy has come out of these periods of obsessions, I'm curious to better understand it's source.

I don’t think it explains much in a scientific sense, but with the theme of passion and obsession, I really enjoyed The Orchid Thief by Susan Orlean: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Orchid_Thief

And this famous quote from that book:

> “The world is so huge that people are always getting lost in it. There are too many ideas and things and people, too many directions to go. I was starting to believe that the reason it matters to care passionately about something is that it whittles the world down to a more manageable size. It makes the world seem not huge and empty but full of possibility."

Edit: before the book was the New Yorker article, if you want to “try before you buy” https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1995/01/23/orchid-fever

Thanks for the interesting reference. The drive to reduce uncertainty could certainly be a hypothesis in explaining animal curiosity and its persistence through natural selection for a population.

I guess I'm more intrigued by the individual phenomena of obsession. The psychological aspects of my occasional obsessions are so vivid to me still. Years back when I got into woodworking, for example, I remember just visualizing as I fell asleep the use of hand planes and the pursuit of getting thinner and thinner shavings. Then I got into bread baking and I pursued everything I could for the ultimate oven spring, I would then start visualizing the reveal of the bread out of the oven. Then I got into mechanical watches (thankfully briefly) and couldn't stop reading about them, and relevant imagery kept popping into my head, etc etc etc.

My world, priorities, value systems all just made sense in those periods which spanned months to years. Then inevitably when I moved on, I would look back and I couldn't relate or understand the obsession anymore. I'd transition from an insider to an outsider looking at it. It always surprises me how that transition, into and out of, an obsession alienates you from yourself.

This is beautiful.

The Professor and the Madman: A Tale of Murder, Insanity, and the Making of the Oxford English Dictionary

https://www.amazon.com/Professor-Madman-Insanity-English-Dic...

I suggest Outside Lies Magic, by John Stilgoe. Short read, well-written.

Cool book. He basically reintroduces us to the world around us, and we never look at it quite the same, afterwards; always wondering what the "story" is behind something that catches our attention.

Part of what makes it interesting, is wondering what goes through the author's head.

Can turn a walk around the block into an obsessive adventure.

It won't explain anything, but it may help us to connect with our own sense of wonder.

https://neglectedbooks.com/?p=1995

https://www.google.com/books/edition/Outside_Lies_Magic/oOjQ...

Possibly related to our naturally-selected drive that underpins Persistence Hunting[0]? Doesn’t speak to the “irrational” prong of your question, but more along the lines of “past any/all expectation.”

And no idea if anyone has already studied this. I had the thought about this possible connection a few nights ago, funny timing.

(The prevalence of Persistence Hunting in human evolution is still an open debate I believe)

[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persistence_hunting

Not a book or article, but Adam Savage's TED talk comes to mind. I can't remember if he touches on the same topics in his book, but he often refers to it as the creative obsessive.

https://www.ted.com/talks/adam_savage_my_obsession_with_obje...

As a young adult I could absorb myself in projects like this...in recent years, mid career, it just doesn't seem to happen. I can't make myself care enough about anything to the extent it's very hard to imagine how someone could do anything like this project. Anyone have a suggestion for how to find that again? Maybe I lost the ability to focus on anything I'm not required to do to get paid. Or maybe I'm mildly depressed and don't know it...how does someone do this?

it's not that you need to "care enough" - it's something you cannot stop yourself from doing.

Stimulants and/or a psychiatric disorder that causes boundless energy. What you're not seeing is the crash and subsequent time-lapse footage of him sleeping for 5 solid days after.

"The project has been in progress since May 2008"

He really just enjoys doing it :)

Wow, that's impressive.

Everything in (https://atomxplus.com[AtOmXpLuS]

He had me at this door hinge mechanism: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a8M-3dK4h1Q

And the steerable, retracting landing gear is phenomenal.

I've gone down this particular rabbit hole before, it's pretty deep. Make sure to view the landing gear timelapse. Crazy attention to detail. I can't help myself and wonder if you'd stick a couple of ducted fans in it and a remote control whether it would fly.

Apparently manila folders are sheets of stiff paper folded in half. They look like folder icon in windows or other OSes. I have never seen one in real life. :-)

Actually :) :). The folder icon looks like a manilla folder :) :) :). Also, the main view where the wallpaper goes is called a desktop according to the same metaphor of a computer being a desk with a desktop where you store and view files.

It seems like a bit of a mixed metaphor since you don't normally paste wallpaper onto a desk's top.

It's definitely a mixed metaphor. It still works, though. Wallpaper is paper used to decorate a wall; in this case the wall is a vertical desk.

I don't keep my garbage can on my desk, either :-). Yes, this is certainly a mixed metaphor - possibly even a cliche.

Hour glass, floppy disk, envelope, AA style battery for laptops, and now manilla folders go on the pile of icons that are too abstract for people to recognize anymore. What next, people won't recognize the sheet of paper for document anymore? Clipboards are probably already weird now.

also telephone icon

And ox head (https://www.britannica.com/topic/A-letter)

Who knows what these things will look like a few millennia from now.

Nice link, great info, thanks.

Any idea what this quote means?

> In the Phoenician alphabet the letter stood for a species of breathing, as vowels were not represented in the Semitic alphabets.

What exactly is a _species of breathing_?

Some kind of typo or misunderstanding. "A" represented the glottal stop, not the vowel sound. Maybe the person who wrote that article was struggling to explain what a glottal stop was? Either way, its nonsense.

Reference?

It's a pronunciation reference. Check out https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smooth_breathing and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rough_breathing

Even electric vehicles use the AA style battery metaphor in their UI.

Perhaps not the best example for how abstract something is. The 18650 battery cells that most electric vehicles use looks very similar to an AA battery. You certainly couldn’t tell them apart from an icon.

A fair point. Do the lithium cells have the protruding button on the positive end?

Apologies for the late reply, only just saw your question. In case you haven’t answered it yourself: Some appear to have the “button top” that you know from AA’s but most appear to omit those. But even those without the button top have a smaller contact on the positive side similar to the button top.

So do cellphones

I don’t know if hour glasses belong in there. Surely those were already mostly decorative when the first hourglass computer icons were developed. Also, I would imagine that most young people still have to occasionally interact with envelopes (government stuff, maybe paying some bills) and cylindrical dry batteries (TV remotes, home thermostats).

> Surely [hour glasses] were already mostly decorative when the first hourglass computer icons were developed

I was a toddler when these icons were created, but I can think of two notable exceptions: egg timers (which my family still used when I was a kid) and board game timers (the canonical example of which, in my mind, is the one that used to ship with Boggle).

I think when it comes to folders it's not due to time but rather regional differences. I don't think this particular style of folders is something that was popular in my country bureaucracies.

I have heard anecdotally that a significant and growing number of children and young people have difficulty reading analog clocks.

I will always upvote this.

My brother worked out the landing gear articulation, with mechanical locking; previous Boeings had complicated hydraulic valving to make the gear stop moving at the bottom, with the failure mode that it immediately folds back in.

Here's hoping some of the 777s are chosen for hydrogen-fuel conversion. A 2-4 year job for a dozen A/Ps, by my guess. Aerogel-insulated LH2 tank amidships, all new fuel piping, new or reconfigured engines, for tens of tons more payload, and ultimately all wind- and solar-powered.

This is absolutely beautiful!!

It speaks for his mindset as I would not have the patience to finish something like this. Besides skill, there's a high amount of perseverance and focus needed that most people don't have. Wow!

It certainly puts my attempt to write a novel to shame. I should get back on that. :)

See also: Bryan Berg, world's greatest card stacker https://www.cardstacker.com/

If you're interested in getting started with paper crafts like this, PePaKuRa [1] is a great software that takes care of all the 2D shapes arrangements and addition of padding for gluing pieces together.

[1] https://tamasoft.co.jp/pepakura-en/

What a great story. I was wondering if a story about this guy have been posted before and indeed, it was.

A Kid Spent 9 Years Building a Detailed Paper Model of a Boeing Jet (2017)

- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19448365

The great takeaway for me from the story is his quote related to how he did all these things.

"I was not born with these skills, I developed them over time. And the original model was actually pretty crude. And I've really learned a lot over the past number of years, and that's how I've gotten to where I am at now."

Someone get this guy a job at Boeing. He seems like a better engineer than some of the people making real planes.

What do you have against him? After having worked at Boeing for 35 years, I would never recommend it to anyone I cared about.

Why not? Tell us your story.

I think we have enough to guess with reasonable accuracy.

Why did you work there for so long if you despise it so?

Maybe the first 20-25 years were better.

Same with IBM: they used to be great back in the day, but now I won't join them (except maybe if I were an IC manufacturing or quantum computing specialist, and the position were in IBM Research).

Boeing invited him to tour their production line https://youtu.be/c47kn_Y4y8A?t=343

Nevermind the model - those Illustrator skills!

"Making of" landing gear:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=77oRSCxGmYA

"Gear Stats:

•3 months' work between design and build (early June - early September). About a month per side.

•Over 200 hours of work total (design+build).

•Over 1,000 parts per side (not including the wheels), for a total well over 2,000.

Video Stats:

•Over 600GB of raw footage/130 hours.

•Editing took 2 weeks.

•Video was sped up 100-200x.

•Produced in Final Cut and Motion."

Lots of good videos by and about this guy https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=luca+iaconi-ste...

Reminds me of someone who makes car scale models mainly out of silver: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JSS7uBzDOio

Absolutely incredible. I clicked on the link expecting nowhere near that level of detail. One of the pictures even shows individual wires on the landing gear. I'm thoroughly impressed by the dedication here.

And one of the wires is even coiled!

This blew my mind, wow! The level of detail is surreal, especially the cabin, wings, and wheels. Feels like looking at a manilla 3d rendering...

It's always struck me as bizarre that it's the convention to refer to length when using the word "scale". When I read it my mind is naturally inclined to think "volume" and I have to remind myself that 1:60 scale does not mean the model is 1/60 the size of the original.

Curious if you feel the same about scale on maps, or does your mental model work differently there?

Not sure. I've never heard someone say or write "this is a 1:50 scale map" or something of the sort.

At least the scale gives you an idea even if not as immediately intuitive as you would like. In model railway world you have O, HO, OO, N and plenty of other scales that sometimes are not even a scale - track guages can be different in scale to the trains.

1:60 is the convention for planes which is not the same as the 1:64 scale used for die cast toy cars. But these are the standards we are stuck with. Well it is convention for planes to be in 1:60 scale

It's not 1/60 the size of the original?

Nope. Volume varies with the cube of the length. A 1:60 scale model only takes up 1/216,000 the space of the original.

You're right. I think it's time to hang up my username and go learn some math.

Wonder if the SpaceX team should have a chat with the designer about trying a Falcon 9 or Heavy next? :)

Doing a model rocket would be tougher there's a lot of bits they just couldn't show him due to ITAR restrictions. Also beyond the engines rockets are a LOT of empty space, there is some interesting structure in the skin but most of the volume is just empty. Destin from Smarter Every Day did a tour of the ULA factory where you can see the skin that provides a lot of the structure for their rockets.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o0fG_lnVhHw

Cool video, thanks. :)

I got a bunch of manila folder after being inspired...but I proceed to do nothing with it.

Wonder how they're doing. Their socials linked on their site are all from 2-3 years ago. Followed this early and I think he may have mostly finished.

vector art layout step is surprisingly manual! I wonder if there's a market for a CAD tool that focuses on creating 2D cutouts for 3D models

The sheet metal workspace in fusion360 does this pretty nicely.

Not exactly what I think you're thinking of, but there's enough of a market for this to exist:

https://www.vectric.com/products/cut2d-pro

More generally, modeling software tends to also handle sheet metal fabrication (closest to what you're thinking of) and surface modeling just fine.

Interesting product, seems like a nice 2D CAD/CAM package.

Is there CAD software that helps you design a 3D product out of 2D parts? It didn't seem like this would really help with that.

As another example, checkout Pepakura for Windows.

I've used OpenSCAD to design simple 3D models and then used Pepakura to unfold them into flat designs. Manually cutting the designs is slow painstaking work. I eventually purchased a Cricut to cut the pieces out, but it's ability to cut shapes to a very specific scale is lacking. So, I find myself not having created very much.

Great job. Handmade detailed models are always very impressive. Making it out of an odd material makes even more interesting.

In a romantic sense, I'd like to think this is what trust fund recipients do with their time.

I wonder, if you fit some kind of propulsion and controls - will the model become flyable enough?

I don't think that was part of the intent - the weight and structural strength is probably a problem (including the strength of the glue joints), and the aerodynamics (because the connections between segments aren't airtight). The materials that the real plane is made of will have properties that are more suitable for a flying object.

There are plenty of flying models of various airliners. Some of them are quite detailed, though none with the incredible interior detailing this 777 has.

You could put a lot of detail into a model that was intended to fly, but you wouldn't want start off with something intended to be a static model.

Why is this particularly Air India though? Is the Boeing 777 different for other airlines?

I do not know, but my guess is that it is related to the cabin layout.

Each airline typically orders a quite specific arrangement of classes and seats which almost surely are unique to an airline.

As to why Air India? Maybe he found a detailed 3D model of their chairs and cabin layout? Or maybe their cabin layout is particularly easy to model?

Sorry for the drivel, just felt the urge to share my speculation.

np, good points. I was curious myself as well

He mentions about that here : https://www.ge.com/news/reports/try-this-at-home-this-kid-bu... "I also happened to find the highly-detailed Air India seat map online, which made it easier to design the interior."

Could be he was sponsored. It looks like one of his other projects was a request from Singapore Airlines, so maybe something similar here?

This level of dedication is so inspiring.

This guy has truly mastered 3d printing!

damn, the amount of time that must have taken, the landing gear and the wing ribs are insane

Even the thrust reverser works

this guy is hilarious.

The level of detail, thought, and painstaking effort behind creating this model is incredible. I imagine it was a fun or cathartic hobby for this person, but man when you think of what else they could have accomplished with a similar level of effort. They could be in a substantially better place financially, which probably would have been more valuable to them personally. If not, then by all means it is time well spent.

Some people would counter that money is not everything, which I mostly agree with. But it can be traded for time, in as much as you are currently trading time for money in a hateful device called a job. And everyone knows that time is both valuable and limited.

That's my opinion, I can't justify time consuming hobbies like this one.

Still, it's a beautiful work of art and the creator should be justifiably proud of it.

Wow. What a selfish perspective. It's art. It made this guy happy. It makes me happy knowing it exists and the complete write up about it. How much is that worth. I can tell you my happiness is worth more than zero. Can't speak for the artist, but willing to guess it is more than zero as well. Who are you state where this individual's time is better spent?

I have no objection to that. But it's this really what he would most want to do with his free time, or just something he did to pass the time?

I would rather spend time with friends and family, play games, read books, travel, etc.

I'm drawing attention to the opportunity cost inherit when you choose any one thing to spend your time on - you can't spend it on anything else, so make it something truly important to you.

If that happens to be building models, so much the merrier.

>I would rather spend time with friends and family, play games, read books, travel, etc.

That's you. Lots of people are perfectly fine without the need for family/friends 24/7. The site clearly stated he had been working on the project since 2008, so they could spend a few weekends here & there on the project and still have plenty of time left for doing whatever else makes you (specific you not the royal one) approve of his endeavors. I might suggest you might have more free time yourself if you just accept things not in your control rather than worrying about how someone else does things you might choose to do differently. I'm suspecting that this is not the only example. You haven't mentioned your hobbies. Let's see if we approve of how you spend your time.

Do you have this same criticism of the people that peruse this site? Or those watching Netflix? But reading books is ok - see how arbitrary that is?

We don't all share the same values, and it's pretty arrogant of you to suggest that yours are universal.

If I spent my weekends flipping burgers instead of kayaking/backpacking/etc, I'd have more money too. But why on earth would I want to do that? This person clearly has some source of income sufficient to let them "waste" hundreds of hours, I don't think they need to be in a rush to dig up more money.

It is actually partially his work (though probably it evolved as such later), see the Singapore Airlines ad campaign from his site:

https://www.lucaiaconistewart.com/singapore-airlines

But yeah I agree, this kind of tedious repetitive work is nothing for me either. I need to do hobbies I can learn from. While this would have been incredibly educational (about aircraft design, construction, project management etc), it also contains a lot of highly repetitive work like building hundreds of the same seats. No thanks.

But anyway I wanted to say that hobbies aren't aways perpendicular to jobs or making money. I've used many things I've learned from hobbies in my job, and in fact my job is pretty much my hobby. And even with unrelated hobbies you can sometimes pull them into your work (as he did here). IMO this is the ideal way to go, yet for a lot of people unfortunately not achievable in this society :(

But kudos to him!! Wow, it looks amazing.

Let people have their fun. Not everything in life needs to be optimized to death. My hobbies are completely unrelated to my job but they make me a much fuller and happier person. As a side-effect, everything else is improved.

If you're worried about this person's impact, think about how many people saw this and were impressed and possibly inspired? I was.

We have a much different effect on the world than we realize. The things we think are important may not be and the kind word or small bit of advice we gave without a second thought may have changed someone else's life. The human experience is too complex to be measured in spreadsheets.

I disagree, what if not time is worth optimizing? It's the only thing you can't get more of.

edit getting down voted by the immortal apparently...

But to what end and for who's benefit? What is the point of the optimization of your time?

For your own benefit mostly. If you want to spend some time for the benefit of society at large, so much the better. But at least you should care about your own benefit.

It just makes me think of the story of the fisherman: https://paulocoelhoblog.com/2015/09/04/the-fisherman-and-the...

Your replies seem to indicate that he should spend his time doing "productive" things instead; that would be more "optimal". I guess I'm tired of this race-to-the-bottom mentality where we spend so much time "optimizing" our productivity that we optimize the joy out of life. Productivity is a good thing, but I'm not convinced it is the greatest good.

What bigger optimization of time could there be other than spending it doing something you love doing? You can't put it in a bank.

On today's episode of "Stop Liking Things That I Don't Like"

Not at all, just puzzled why people do things like this that don't seem to better their situation.

Unless he's doing exactly what he would really want to do with his free time, in which case it is optimal.

People said the same thing for those who invented email, the World Wide Web, tcp/ip, and other technologies.

Nobody saw the value in it at the time of doing it. That’s the thing about having true creative vision, to also have the conviction to do those things that nobody else sees the value of doing.

I mean, why does anyone have any hobbies? Why do people build model layouts, or models at all? Why read/write for fun? Why keep small gardens? Why do photograhy? Why do people still run their own dark rooms? Why do people write software in their spare time? Why do people cook?

This strain of thinking that every spare minute must be accounted for and be in the service of improving one’s circumstances is something all too common in tech.

We’re not ants.

It's also a very narrow idea of what someone's "circumstances" are. Physical and mental well-being are part of your circumstances as well, and hobbies often cater to one or both of those.

Seriously. This is one of the most tired criticisms out there. It has existed since I got into technology 25 years ago. "Wow, you sure spent a lot of time doing that, and it's just a game!" -- Said most everyone in high school trying to get me to stop writing C code and hacking on my MUDs [edit: to do my actual school work]. Turns out it was pretty darn important I got into C and MUDs, without it I would not be in tech most likely :)

Person A: Look at this cool thing I did. Purely because I wanted to.

Person B: Wow you sure spent a lot of time on that. Surely you could be doing something more productive.

I find people that make this comment tend to not really understand or appreciate hacker "culture". We learn through experimentation and scratching itches. Maybe its not directly applicable to real world skills. Maybe it is. The process is what makes a good hacker. This person surely learned a lot about engineering and design in doing this project. Most importantly they wanted to do it.

Many people fill their time with bullshit on the Internet these days. I personally wonder what cool projects and other "pointless" things people could be creating if they weren't stuck on social media and consumed content.

I've been spending the last couple of years doubling down on learning Swift, and the Swift ecosystem. It's been 14 hours a day, seven days a week.

And I haven't been paid a dime.

All the while, I have been told that I'm "wasting my time," "you should be learning React Native and Javascript," and that "Apple is a dead company." etc. ad nauseam

Since I've been hearing that same refrain (substitute "Windows" for "React Native," and "C" for "JavaScript") for the last 34 years, it doesn't phase me that much.

The simple fact of the matter is, I can afford to take the time to do it, I really like Swift, and I really like developing for Apple systems.

Maybe it will result in some kind of lucrative stuff; maybe not. I don't care.

I spent over 30 years, writing software that other people used as toilet paper. I'm doing what I want.

This guy is doing what he wants. Good on him.

One of the nice things about art, is that it is something other people enjoy; maybe, even more than we (the artists) do.

I think it's great.

I also enjoyed this[0], a couple of years ago.

[0] https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=1757088830996244

Since we are sharing: I've spent the last couple of years, on and off, building a physics engine from scratch. Pretty hard considering I'm not a mechanical engineer. Lots of fun though.

Excellent! You should do a "Show HN," when you are done.

What language are you using? What is your destination platform?

UPDATE: I just looked at your HN handle. Questions answered. Good show!

>>What language are you using?

Java

>>What is your destination platform?

Mac, Windows, iPhone, Android

I have not run Java on iPhone (that I know of). Do you know if it will pass the App Store review?

I'm first transcoding the Java code into Objective-C code with a Java to Objective-C transcoder that I wrote for fun. Google has their own Java To Objective-C transcoder, though I've never used it.

Cool. I wrote a Pascal-to-C++ transcriber in the late 1980s. It was mostly done with RegEx, on a command line.

What a nightmare.

You have cool hobbies.

Awesome! Thanks.

I think Apple removed their restrictions on programming languages long ago. If you can get it to run on the platform, you can use it, AFAIK.

No. Apple doesn't natively support Java on iOS, but there is an app called Pico[0], that supposedly acts like a Java IDE.

It doesn't seem to be a particularly popular program, but it's the only one I've seen that does it.

I don't know if this[1] ever bore fruit.

The transcoder Java->ObjC isn't a bad idea. The languages have a lot of similarities.

[0] https://apps.apple.com/in/app/pico-compiler-java-compiler-jd...

[1] https://www.infoworld.com/article/3407781/a-plan-to-bring-ja...

Enough that Apple offered Cocoa bindings in it for a while!

At one time, I think that Steve Jobs wanted Java to be a native language for Apple development, but it ended up getting sidelined by Objective-C.

Developers had a difficult time, adjusting to ObjC. It’s very different from C, whereas Java was familiar to almost everyone.

> Some people would counter that money is not everything, which I mostly agree with. But it can be traded for time

Yes, it can be traded for time to spend on things you enjoy doing -- such as your hobbies.

Do you have any hobbies at all?

I'm sorry you got downvoted, I agree with you. If only this serious amount of effort was directed towards something meaningful the world would be much greater.

This is so backwards. Many people seem to fill their time with social media and other pointless activities. These types of hobbies and projects are a missing, and critical, component to staying fulfilled and happy while avoiding many of the traps of modern technology. If a person gets fulfillment out of it no one here should be judging them. It is no different than reading for enjoyment.

That’s the kind of thinking that has achieved... nothing of importance.

Just going to be very, very disappointed if it doesn't actually fly...

Even if it did I wouldn't fly it!

After flying some RC models myself the chances of crashing it are way too high and without replaceable parts... Idk, pretty risky!

This community is so weird/random

I can't believe this silly thing is in the frontpage.

It's the hacker news "culture". As much as this site loves to hate on reddit (and I don't disagree with reddit hate), this community has its own cringe and pretentiousness which can be seen in silly articles like this reaching the front page.

Edit for the downvoters: what does this article have to with technology besides the fact that some self proclaimed hacker thinks this article is interesting? This isn't hacker news, this is an attempt at hacker "community" and all the off topic articles are so random it makes me cringe and not visit this site anymore. This site comes off as a lifestyle magazine anymore.

I didn’t downvote, but just to explain what I see here: you used negative value judgements with words like “cringe” and “pretentious”, and then your question assumes that HN articles must be about technology.

It’s worth re-reading the guidelines, because the definition of what’s invited and acceptable here is (and always has been) precisely that which hackers find interesting:

“On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.”

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Also, stories don’t get to the front page on their own. They get there when a lot of people upvote them. Since your insults are directed at the people that upvoted this, and are being read by the people that upvoted this and visited the comments section, downvotes are quite predictable. It’s perhaps a good idea to upvote the things you like, and visit those comment sections instead of complaining.

Why would I spend anymore time on this cringey lifestyle magazine? Site used to be alright. I've said my complaint, responded to you, and now I'm gone

Do you work for Airbus?

Research, design, printing, assembly...it's all there in the article. I find it thought-provoking that an extremely complex machine can be represented in great detail with so mundane a material.

The re-creation of a 3D form from a non-rigid, non-ductile 2D material requires a surprising intuition for topology and projection.

Even if you just see this model as a low-tech knick-knack, I don't see what's pretentious about appreciating a model of one of the world's best-known aircraft, made of one of the most ubiquitous and accessible materials on earth. You could show this to a group of children in the countryside of a third-world country and they, too, would be amazed by it.

Nobody cares if you don't want to visit HN any more because you don't like the articles that are collectively upvoted here.

Cool story