Hi, please take a minute to answer these 2 simple questions:
1) I want to take a part or some plygons in my plane's VC and put a texture on it so it appears to glow a little...alomst like a tiny bulb in a car's dashboard. How can i accomplish this?
i build for both FS9 and FSX.
2) I did my taildragger airplane's suspension according to Milton's tutorial but when it sits on the ramp with engines off, it shakes all over as if it has the chills. What is going on here?
Thanks for your time.
Sid
Sid,
The gauge backlighting requires no additional objects in the model. The VC has a planar onto which gauges are displayed. The texture you apply to that has a name that starts with a $ like $vc01. In that material and texture, you must select a self illumination option or something to that effect, and assign a texture to it, like vc01_L.bmp.
That self illumination texture then resides in the texture folder as a vc01_L.bmp texture. Note same name as the the file=vc01.bmp except with the _L.
[Vcockpit01]
file=vc01.bmp // this texture must reside in the Panel folder
Background_color=0,0,0
size_mm=1024,1024
visible=1
pixel_size=1024,1024
texture=$vc01 //this is the bmp assigned to the planar in front of the vc panel
The self illumination texture works as a light additive property. At night the normal vc panel will be dark. The light values on the vc01_L are added to the light on the dark VC panel to brighten the gauges.
So, what I do is copy the vc01 bmp, darken it about 50% or so, flip it vertically (required to be upside down), then add a medium to light gray to all gauge circles or areas you want lighted. Put this in the texture folder(s).
Hope this helps and sorry if it may be gmax speak instead of FSDS.
For all other VC or exterior parts, you can add lighting effects in the alpha channels of the textures related light maps. The alpha of these textures must be pure black.
For example, cabin_t.bmp and cabin_L.bmp - The _L is a light map that would provide additive lighting to the normal texture when the nav lights are turned on.
Milton
