Why generic prop discs aren't always good
Hi Kelti,
I keep your 3 blade prop blur close by at all times as I often use it whenever a new plane is downloaded. Regrettably, I'm not always able to use it, as in the case of Rockster's Bre695. It would be great if this plane can be updated, but as we say, "it's the only game in town." I feel that French aircraft are not always well represented, if at all, in CFS2. William Dickens (Bismarck13) has done an extremely well job on his Bloch MB152, D520, and a few others that escape my memory. Hope you can get this project going again.
TW
Hi TW,
I found out from my old records our friend who worked for a while on Rockster22's Bre.695 was JapLance. I haven't heard from him since March of 2011, the last mdl he sent me dated the end of February.
JapLance was able to center the propeller spinning axis, but when he cured another model glitch the axis went off again and I guess he had it for the time being.
I'll try sending him an e-mail him to find out if he would be interested in picking up the project where he left, I assure you he was getting very nice results. I came up with 512x512 blurred textures which reduced the pixel sizes and the visual effect was very nice.
I have a sitting project since then to turn all of my prop textures from 256x256 to 512x512 but it's a huge eye effort, after a few times I work on it I drop it again. Once I can get a full size blurred texture, fitting it to a given model is not that big deal.
As to what you wrote, not everybody knows that each model designer assigns a different prop disc diametre to their creations and that each aircraft needs to be checked whether the outer prop disc diametre is the correct one or not. Often enough, models designed by the same author differ from one another, which blows my mind!
If the outer diametre is too small we get the hidoeus effect of seeing the propeller shrinking as soon as the sim engine displays the blurred disc, if it's too large we see the outer prop circle displayed polygonal, because that's what any aircraft *.mdl has. It's possible to see the shape of these polygonal prop discs just by moving the blurred prop texture temporarily out of the aircraft \texture folder.
Through the alpha texture of the blurred prop file the sim displays it transparent, without it, it is displayed completely opaque. Allen posted a perfect example here:
http://www.sim-outhouse.com/soh_ftp/uploads/imageuploads/435813677087058302.jpg
So, in order to have a perfectly round prop disc, as it always is in real life, the blurred texture must be a pixel or two smaller than the mdl disc, hiding with the outer transparent portion the polygonal profile of the prop disc.
In a few words, the sim engine "maps" the prop texture on the mdl disc, what becomes a true headache is when the propeller texture is incorrectly mapped and it spins lopsided, one pixel out of place is enough. Since I have to design perfectly round discs as they must always be, any wrong prop texture mapping, whose responsibility is of the original designer, shows up as a wobbling propeller, the most improbable thing that can happen since, in real life, vibrations caused by an unbalanced propeller would destroy the plane!!
Any of us probabaly experienced something of the like when our tyre place did a poor job balancing our new tyres, as soon as we drove up to speed the steering wheel started vibrating. In car a new balancing job would cure the problem, in a prop-driven airplane this would lead to disaster. This is also why I wrote a few times that my prop textures tend to enhance any original design defect and even the original stock blurred discs are not correct, as they are smaller than the actual length of the stock models prop blades.
I hope I explained you enough why there are times when you cannot use my generic textures, which I do not reccomend anymore since the time I discovered each aircraft model needs a taylored, custom blurred prop texture.
Cheers!
KH:ernae:
When I go home from work I'll find out his name.