Hobbs Army Air Base

crashaz said:
Sorry been down with the flu but back up under steam again.
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Sorry to hear you've been under the weather Crashaz and glad you are up and about again. As you can see I have been busy while you were down so will need to send you lots of model files and the latest tex file for the library.

Did you say you were interested in doing the hospital complex? I was looking at that earlier today and came to the conclusion that it may be far easier to build one version of each of the buildings and then merge them into a single model and clone duplicates in there as they will all carry the same tex mapping then instead of mapping them en-mass. The covered walkway that connects ALL the buildings would also be much easier to construct if it was all one large model too.

I could then drop the entire complex into ADE in one go and adjust the roads if need be.

If you don't fancy doing the hospital after all maybe you could concentrate on all the flight line buildings as the only things down there at the moment are the stock towers, your three main hangars and my flight line HQ and there are a lot of buildings that need making for that area.

I am currently working on the Officer's Mess and was then going to look at the OR Messes (three identical buildings) but they are a peculiar shape and I have been unable to find even a single photo showing the building style anywhere. I even searched through the three DoD PDF docs I have (several hundred pages each) and found nothing even close to the Hobbs OR Messes.
 
Time for another update I think and lots more buildings in.

First up the base PX.....

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...next the cadet's classroom (there are a couple of these buildings)...

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...here we have the OR's latrine and the supply hut (lots of these scattered over the cantonment area).....

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...and a row of Officer's latrines.........

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....here are a couple of the OR's mess halls (there is a third further over to the north).....

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....the Officer's mess.....

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....and finally (phew!).....one of two (slightly different) cadet mess halls....

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I think I am going to take a look at the motor pool and sub-depot warehouse areas next. Still lots more to model! ;)
 
Milton Shupe said:
Excellent progress to date. Any updates? :wiggle:
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I've been a very busy boy since the last update Milton. ;)

I now have all the Motor Pool buildings in......

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..... and all the buildings in the Sub-Depot (warehouse/rail yard area).....

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If you look in the distance in that last shot you will also see that all the buildings are also in place in the munitions dump.

I got bored with building simple huts so a couple of weeks ago I started on a vehicle project. I have modelled vehicles and aircraft before but those were in Blender. This time I am learning to do it in a different program and it's taking time. I have the model finished now and I am trying to get it UVW mapped and textured at the moment but that has always been a problem area for me and again it's taking time to do. This is what I have as a model.............

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....it's currently at about 1.8k polys which is not bad as I was trying to keep it below 2k for performance reasons.
 
Wow! :applause: This is so awesome! This is an exciting time for the HAAF Base. :ernae:

I have been working on an AT-11 skinnied down if you are interested but it is still too large to consider static scenery. Maybe an AI that comes and goes.
 
I can use it for AI for sure and can have it flying to the aux airfields and back (or if I can figure out how to make AI fly around waypoints instead of from airport to airport I can have it touring the 7 bombing targets in there too).

Can you export one of the LODs as a static Milton? That's what Rob at A2A was talking about doing so I could have some B-17 statics.
 
I finally got my latest model in game a few minutes ago at my local airport that I use for testing purposes. Here's a few screenies of it......

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Unfortunately I also made a discovery that I could kick myself over! :isadizzy:

In an effort to cut down on the number of polys used for the entire project I have been deleting all unseen bottom faces from all the buildings and from the ambulance. When I got it in game I wondered why I was not seeing a shadow from the vehicle despite having 'volume shadow' turned on in the material settings. It turns out that FSX will ONLY make shadows for a fully closed object (i.e. no open faces) so none of my models will cast shadows. Seeing as FSX works on vertex shaders too (unlike FS9) the poly count is actually unimportant as it is the vertex count that matters so I could have left all those bottom faces in with no hit on the FPS!

The dilemma I face now is do I say 'oops' and carry on the way I have been going or do I go back and add bottom faces to all those models just so that I can have shadows from the buildings and vehicles. However, the shadows themselves may well turn out to be a big FPS hit considering the number of buildings I have at Hobbs.

Decisions, decisions!.....lol.

Anyone have any suggestions as to the best way forward from here?
 
In FS9 I never run scenery shadows mainly because of the frame hits.

I think it is important for vehicles and aircraft, but less so for me on buildings.

However, in this case, it would help realism a bit.

Your call ... I will be happy with all that you deliver. :applause:
 
After much messing around with 'AI Flight Planner' I finally got your AT-11 flying around Milton. :applause:

I must say it's wearing a rather snazzy suit too but may be a bit bright for USAAF regulations! ;)
 
After a lengthy lay-off due to the RTWR and some RL issues I have finally got back to this project and just managed to get the hospital complex in game after fighting with the Gmax exporter for 24 hours due to some missing MSXML files.

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The entire thing is a single model comprising EIGHTY separate items.

I can move on to other stuff now after that time consuming item!
 
Time for another update I think ;) . I have added quite a few things recently.

Here's the fire station ...

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... and the base operations building ....

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... in this shot are the two crash stations on the flight line plus one example (of several) of a 'L' shaped building (not sure exactly what it was used for) .....

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I then moved onto the railyard and started building rolling stock, first up were the box cars ...

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... followed by the flat cars (with several different loads) ....

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... and finally the tank cars ...

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We're getting there .... slowly! :jump:
 
That is some nice work on the rail equipment! Dang, wish I had skills like that... :salute:
 
After some research I decided to go with an Alco S2 diesel switcher (shunter) as I found that AT&SF bought 70 of these units in 1942 and it's possible one could have found it's way to Hobbs by 1943 which is the period for the airfield.

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