Conspicuous by Their Absence

Gotta Love it

As usual Ivan you are talking about 42000 feet above my brain capacity, Hell I ain't nere as smart as all ya''ll on the " Round Table" of the " Order Of Sims". Shoot I was lucky to make it out of D'Iberville High School, probably had something to do with the fact they had a student smoking area and the PTA sold beer at the football games ?

All I know is everyone can't wait until your next release, because they don't get released until they are perfect.

"Laissez Les bon Temps Rouler" my friend !

So, in wrapping up, I'll take your word for it. It's going to be a great fly.

Dave www.thefreeflightsite.com
 
Actually perhaps I am not nearly as smart as I thought I was. Turns out that I wrote a bit too soon. The signs for the change didn't quite look right, but I wrote the message anyway. Seems like I got everything backwards. I believe now that the real cause of the instability is a 100 gallon fuel tank under the cockpit which is 3 to 4 feet behind the CoG CoL. The full tank causes a very far aft loading when it is full. Still playing.....

- Ivan.
 
With the discussion about Float Planes, I decided to finish up my A6M2 Model 21 Zero. I keep running into limitations of the AF99 software. Here is an example: The plane looked fine a couple days ago but I noticed that the Aft Wall of the cockpit isn't textured. Neither is the Control Panel.

When I assigned textures, here is what I got..... Time to see where I ca be a bit more economical.

- Ivan.
 
Or time to use SCASM...:kilroy:

I know your objections, but, from my point of view, this is where our philosophies take different roads. AF99 preaches what it doesn't do; economy. To facilitate its work, it forces you to redo the same parts again and again, which is a highway for reaching AF99 limits sooner than later.

SCASM not only liberates you from AF99 "limits", it permits to, most of the time, draw once-and-for-all the part, which is really economic.

I'm tempted to start a thread where people could learn to draw their own "aircraft-like" objects. Nothing fancy, all done with freewares, just for the fun of it. Like crosswords or plastic-modeling.

Anyone interested?:ernae::ipepsi2:
 
Sounds Like a Plan

Between you and Ivan, I am sure we could all learn some interesting stuff. I remember years back when a gentleman used scasm to add a banner that flied behind his plane and the IG4 guys added pilot heads to some reworks they did.

I would love to learn how to apply scasm to macros ( other than a box) and eliminate the bleed in CFS1. CFS2 seems not to have that problem.

Ivan, the plane is looking great to me.

Dave www.thefreeflightsite.com
 
No Dice said:
Between you and Ivan, I am sure we could all learn some interesting stuff. I remember years back when a gentleman used scasm to add a banner that flied behind his plane and the IG4 guys added pilot heads to some reworks they did.

I would love to learn how to apply scasm to macros ( other than a box) and eliminate the bleed in CFS1. CFS2 seems not to have that problem.

Ivan, the plane is looking great to me.

Dave www.thefreeflightsite.com
Click to expand...

If you know how to make scenery macros, No Dice, you're half-way there!

SCASM, with possibly FSASM, is one of the few assemblers around. CFS2 is no different than CFS1, except for the z-buffering, which explain the no-bleeds. But even CFS2 has bleeds in some circumstances. For example, my jeep shows some bleeds when used in it. The funny thing here is that CFS1, when properly mastered, can do things by showing orders that CFS2 can't.

But, basically, you can work CFS2 with SCASM as well.

Ivan's A6M2 is certainly fine, but I hope that you have noticed the big hole in the cowling, a sure sign of AF99 tantrums. The aircraft still compiles in AF99 (which, incidentally, uses an internal version of SCASM), but misses parts.
 
No Dice,
You DO see the hole in the cowling?

Hubbabubba,
We have discussed this a bunch of times. I would not have been able to do this canopy frame rebuild using SCASM. In AF99, I can see how the lines either converge or gradually change direction. In SCASM, you can't see that. I don't know that I can calculate a line of increasing or decreasing curvature in my head. It helps to have a graphical program to do a graphical task. In doing this canopy, I made lots of changes to parts by moving a vertex only about 0.01 or 0.02 feet, build, check contours again. What got me looking was a mismatch between the glass polygons and the frame polygons. Without a visual reference, I could not make these tweaks.

Don't worry, I DO use SCASM to change the Cockpit POV and a couple other things.

- Ivan.
 
Well yes I noticed the hole but was hoping it was a simple problem in the texture mapping.

I do make many of my macros but tend to keep them simple in CFS1 because of the bleed and my pea sized brain.
Anyone using EOD or FSDS cam make a macro for CFS2 but many that may seem simple to the Hubba and or Ivan just don't work in CFS1 without the higher brain capacity required to understand manipulating scasm.

Nuff Said
 
Ivan said:
No Dice,
You DO see the hole in the cowling?

Hubbabubba,
We have discussed this a bunch of times. I would not have been able to do this canopy frame rebuild using SCASM. In AF99, I can see how the lines either converge or gradually change direction. In SCASM, you can't see that. I don't know that I can calculate a line of increasing or decreasing curvature in my head. It helps to have a graphical program to do a graphical task. In doing this canopy, I made lots of changes to parts by moving a vertex only about 0.01 or 0.02 feet, build, check contours again. What got me looking was a mismatch between the glass polygons and the frame polygons. Without a visual reference, I could not make these tweaks.

Don't worry, I DO use SCASM to change the Cockpit POV and a couple other things.

- Ivan.
Click to expand...

I don't worry Ivan! LOL!

And I know that, for a virtuoso of the violin, learning to play the banjo is not a very appealing proposition. And you are a virtuoso of AF99.:applause:
​
 
This model was doing just fine until I decided to line up the polygons on the canopy frame and glass. I had to add a few polygons because some of the glass could not line up along a canopy frame.

THEN, I was getting bleeds from the canopy frame.

When I added more polygons to the canopy frame, I started losing large parts of the cowl.

I reworked the canopy frame with different glue and fewer polygons and then most of the bleeds disappeared.

After that, I noticed that the control panel was not textured nor was the cockpit aft wall. In adding textures there, I lost pieces of the cowl.

In adding textures to these two parts, pieces of the cowl went away again.

Here is a test to steal about 6 polygons per side off the wings. They won't change in shape and it brings the resource count down enough to restore the cowl. Now I just have to reshape some of the polygons to restore the shape. Actually it should end up better than it was before.

- Ivan.
 
Hi Hubbabubba,
:jump:
That hole is the result of stealing 6 polygons off the left wing tip. Three off the top and three off the bottom. I wasn't sure that reducing the polygon count by that little would be sufficient to restore sanity to AF99, but it was.

After that experiment proved to work, I found that since this was derived off one of my first projects, I made all the parts and didn't mirror any. The right wing had all right wing parts instead of left wing parts fit to the opposite side. Thus, I would have to modify both left wing parts and right wing parts to finish the job.

Instead, I chose to spend about an hour writing a short C program to copy the left wing component and reset a flag in each part entry to fit to the side opposite from where it was in the original. Program worked fine, so now WingR is an exact copy of WingL but just with each polygon flipped.

Now you might be wondering why don't I just keep the WingL component and fit to opposite side in final assembly. I found that this method doesn't always work with AF99 even though it should.

The final task was to modify all the affected wing parts to stretch them over the hole. That wasn't very difficult because it was just a matter of snapping to existing vertices on the remaining wing tip parts.

After that, I was too sleepy to finish up the texturing on the cockpit interior. I still need to flip the plane around in the simulator to make sure some other piece of the plane isn't missing a few polygons.

- Ivan.
 
After removing 6 polygons from each wing, the remaining polygons were altered to cover the opening that resulted.

The original "Long Wing" was derived from my A6M5 Reisen by taking off the wing tip and adding a new group of parts that extended the wing. Economy wasn't my goal. That original extended wing remains on my A6M3 Model 22 Reisen. The new A6M2 Wing can be seen in the other screenshot and in my opinion does not adversely change the shape.

- Ivan.
 
Actually I guess *I* am up again.

I took a little time to finish up the pretty much ongoing Fokker Eindecker I had been working on. I can say I didn't bother with a lot of the checks that I normally do on a plane, but it seems OK to me.

This originally started life as a test of what could be done with a lot of 2D parts.

- Ivan.
 
In the ongoing attempt to start as many projects as possible and finish nearly none of them, I am looking around for another subject to build for AF99 as an illustration of a How-To process.

Short List includes:
1. Yakovlev Yak-9 (or 7, or 9U, or 1, or even perhaps a 3)
2. Messerschmitt Me 109G-10 or K
3. Mitsubishi J2M3 Raiden 21
4. Kawanishi N1K2-J Shiden-KAI
5. Macchi C205 Veltro

Yes, There are other projects currently in the works, but they are of enough complexity that the shapes of the model itself would be a distractor to just illustrating basic principles.

- Ivan.
 
Ivan said:
In the ongoing attempt to start as many projects as possible and finish nearly none of them, I am looking around for another subject to build for AF99 as an illustration of a How-To process.

Short List includes:
1. Yakovlev Yak-9 (or 7, or 9U, or 1, or even perhaps a 3)
2. Messerschmitt Me 109G-10 or K
3. Mitsubishi J2M3 Raiden 21
4. Kawanishi N1K2-J Shiden-KAI
5. Macchi C205 Veltro

Yes, There are other projects currently in the works, but they are of enough complexity that the shapes of the model itself would be a distractor to just illustrating basic principles.

- Ivan.
Click to expand...

It will be #5 for me; nice looking machine with clean lines and, as far as I know, you haven't done Italian yet.
 
to be honest, at first blush,
i thought, oh brother,
here we go again.
you tease!

sorry, for that,
i'm just a cynical a$$

but then, i reread the post a few times
and realized that you intend
on doing a tutorial project...right?
if so, very cool.

so, i guess i will go along with the others
and vote for the Veltro
for all the reasons stated above.

it should be interesting
to see the project progress.

have fun
 
Hubbabubba,
Seems like your choice is very popular. I was kind of surprised that the Yak wasn't more popular since I don't believe anyone has actually done a good one. The Macchi fighters have at least a couple good examples.


No Dice,
I have been thinking about the Stuka also. There is a pretty fair Ju-87B out there but I don't believe anyone has actually done a Ju-87D very well.


Smilo,
You might consider it a tease, but I was looking for an uncomplicated project. The Dornier as you know isn't a simple project. The majority of the issues aren't related to how to use AF99. They are more related to the complicated shapes and how to fit them together and then how to combine things in SCASM that can't be done in a single project.

What I need for a AF99 Tutorial is something uncomplicated. The Veltro does have asymmetrical wings which is a bit strange, but certainly no show stopper.


One of the other project considerations was the Ki-43 Hayabusa either as a -II or a -III version. I believe a radial engined plane would illustrate more techniques, but the Veltro is good enough.

BTW, Anna Honey left for China on a Business trip this morning. Ivan the single parent will be seriously occupied for about a week and a half just doing the feeding and chauffering thing.

The Countdown Begins!
- Ivan.
 
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