First self-made aircraft, now in FSX.

[EgoR64]

Great Stuff Bjoern,

So far I have only delvd a little into GMAX, Still Waiting for the Gmax for Super Dummies - LOL !! I did manage to make what appears to be a bomb and of course my fav the Babe Bucket - LOL !!

Many Cheers to your adventure & I hope we get to fly her someday !!

 

[Brett_Henderson]

Well Done ! :salute:

The humanitarian in me wants to tell you to RUN far away from this stuff, while you still have a soul ..

But I think you might have crossed the point of no return.. LOL

RE: The bone stuff.. I'm no expert, and there's no doubt you've learned pricelss modeling skills, but I think it's over-kill for mechanical animations. As mentioned.. pivot-points, linking and meticulaous transformations will get the same effect. with less workload at run-time. I've got a Bae-146 in the works with a similar gear arrangement. Solid parts and hinge-like animations.

As for flight-dynamics.. as soon as the model is functional, drop me a PM. I'll take a stab at it if my current project (Partenavia P68) doesn't have me consumed.

 

[Daube]

Great job so far Bjoern !
I have no (or very few) knowledge in aircraft modelling but I understand you've been through some serious (and successfully) experimentation time there. Good luck for the rest of the model, this is the kind of plane I really like, I just hope you can fit some nice virtual cockpit in it

 

[kilo delta]

Excellent work,Bjoern...can't wait to try this in FSX. :ernae:



When did you say it'd be ready?

 

[Bjoern]

Woah, page two already! :isadizzy:

A big "thank you" to the rest of you as well!

Rigid meshes can be animated as accurately using the classics method, with the benefit of better performance.
Just place your object's pivots to the correct locations/orientations and use local coordinates from the rollout to move/rotate the stuff.

Well, so far performance is really good and in the case it gets out of hand I can still revert to the classical method.

The whole pivot method was too inaccurate for my taste when I started, but now that I think of it...yeah, it's an option. With a correct hierachy and stuff....

DUDE...That plane is missing a prop.....

Prop number two is coming once number one is animated.

You will begin to think of it as your child. You will start calling it things like 'liebshin' and 'my little babooshkah' and other romantic things. You will dream of it at night, flying in it, talking to it, trying to think of a way to make the interior window edges more smooth, how to animate the gear better, the ultimate prop disc, how the engines should sound, how the door sound alignment could be done to synch with the door animations, etc, etc, etc, etc, etc...

Believe me, I've been there for a long time. This thing occupies my mind during every mental meditation, err...shower session.

You will wake up from a daze with a body in pain and realise you hadnt eaten in 3 days, and have just enough energy left to crawl to the kitchen for bread and cheese sticks, then back to the computer to Max...

Yup. I've lost six pounds so far during (I think) this week. A nice way to lose weight.

Wilkommen zum unseren World... :d

[Grammar nazi mode]
...in unserer Welt. :d
[/Grammar nazi mode]

RE: The bone stuff.. I'm no expert, and there's no doubt you've learned pricelss modeling skills, but I think it's over-kill for mechanical animations. As mentioned.. pivot-points, linking and meticulaous transformations will get the same effect. with less workload at run-time. I've got a Bae-146 in the works with a similar gear arrangement. Solid parts and hinge-like animations.

Yeah, the 146's gear is quite similar.

Yet, having everything follow you with the drag of a handle in real-time is aaaaweome.

As for flight-dynamics.. as soon as the model is functional, drop me a PM. I'll take a stab at it if my current project (Partenavia P68) doesn't have me consumed.

Cool, thanks for the offer Brett!

Good luck for the rest of the model, this is the kind of plane I really like, I just hope you can fit some nice virtual cockpit in it

Ha! A VC is the main reason why I started work on the 328 in the first place! MSFS hasn't seen a VC in one of those since 2002 and even back then it only had a static one. So I really have enough "firsts" to grab. :d




As for you two...

When did you say it'd be ready?

When will it be released? (I am waiting impatiently... ;o)))))

...I'll pay you a visit. WITH A TANK!



Btw: I'm considering making this project the first "open source" and evolutionary aircraft in MSFS history. Say I'll throw the external model on my webspace and add and fix stuff as time passes. This can provide me with some fairly instantaneous feedback and eliminate the wait for you guys.
I'm still mentally fighting over whether I should make it literal open source (provide the .max file in the download) or not. On the one hand...open source, on the other...a whole tree of different, confusing versions of the model.
Hmm...

 

[grunau_baby]

...I'll pay you a visit. WITH A TANK!

Nah, that´s not my trip, mate!

But seing your progress and regarding my own ever trials at 3D-aircraft modelling - which got pretty well nowhere... - I am impressed. Looks like a true labor of love!

Alex

 

[Gibbage]

I have quite a few video tutorials I made that may help you out on your model. Take a look at some of them.

http://www.youtube.com/user/gibbage1

If there are area's you would like a little info on, let me know! Ill do my best to help out.

 

[Lionheart]

Nah, that´s not my trip, mate!

But seing your progress and regarding my own ever trials at 3D-aircraft modelling - which got pretty well nowhere... - I am impressed. Looks like a true labor of love!

Alex

Alex,

I say we come over there and put Gmax back on your computer!


You know.. You can make cars on Gmax also.





Bill

 

[Lotus]

Your plane is looking great Bjoern. Developing planes is an incredibly difficult and time consuming endeavour but it's awfully satisfying when it all comes together, hehe.

I'd like to play devil's advocate on the subject of skinned mesh and performance though if I may. It can both hurt or help performance immensely depending on where and how it is used. Provided that you use the same material and texture on a bunch of animated parts, skinning them as one mesh can actually save you a ton of performance, but only if the hierarchy is very flat. It's great for things like ailerons, elevators, rudders etc as you can combine all these parts into a single object and they will be rendered as one draw call, rather than a bunch of them. Every part on an airplane that is animated with traditional rotations and transforms results in the sim having to make it a new draw call. Draw calls aren't the end all be all of performance (high poly and texture vertex counts hurt a lot more) but they do add up, and skinning can help keep them in check.

The trouble with skinned mesh comes when you use it on objects with very deep hierarchies or chains of bones, such as a complex articulating landing gear. When you have more than 2 or 3 bones in a chain you end up multiplying the work the cpu has to do in transforming all the vertices exponentially each frame, and it can slow things down a fair bit. So for landing gear I'd recommend making them with traditional animations. Another bonus of going traditional for the gear is that you can hide those parts with visibility tags when they're retracted into their bays, saving even more render time when the plane is in flight. Trying to use vis tags on skinned mesh objects is very dicey. It works about 1% of the time, blows up the other 99%, at least in my experience, hehe.

For all other animations though, where you don't have complex hierarchies of parts, skinned mesh can really help things out on the FPS front in the final product, and with a limit of 128 bones per model you can knock a heck of a lot of draw calls off if you plan it out carefully. It's quite a potent feature of FSX.

Good luck with the project!

-Mike

 

[peter12213]

Listen to the MASTER ^^^LOL! :salute:

 

[Bjoern]

I have quite a few video tutorials I made that may help you out on your model. Take a look at some of them.

http://www.youtube.com/user/gibbage1

If there are area's you would like a little info on, let me know! Ill do my best to help out.

Oh, those are yours? Haha, I've watched them ages ago and they were fairly informative. :d

...

Well, I just got my first kick to the head with bones anyways. Suspension, extraction/retraction and nose wheel steering just don't work together with bones. *Grr*
So back to regular techniques for the problematic parts. *Sigh*

As for performance, it's five materials split up on ~60k polies with 100 bones (using two materials of those five). I want the final plane to use no more than ten materials and as few texture files as possible.

So I *hope* I'll be safe in terms of performance. So far, my quad doesn't complain.

 

[Bjoern]

Yesterday's jam, err....screenshots.

Wing view. Spoilers, weird shading,...


...trim tabs and roll spoilers.


Flaps. Note to self: Do some textures providing *way* more contrast.


Rudder and elevator plus trim tabs.


Pax door, cargo door, prop.


Feathered...


...unfeathered.


Cabin. To be filled with butt-ugly low-poly seats.


Nose gear detail.

 

[Bjoern]

I think I could pass this off as a VC.


Main gear detail. Ignore the buggy dampers for now.


Baggage compartment. I love the light shining into it.


Pax door again...


...to show off the folding railing a bit.



Lots of stuff left to do, but I'm mostly there (in terms of an avergae exterior model).