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Northrop F-15A / RF-61C Reporter

Just a quick update here, with the early stages of the cockpit in place. All place-holder textures at the moment but all looking nice, especially with those reflective canopy textures in P3D v4. Lots of cleaning up to do but working my way steadily from the front of the airplane to the back, sorting issues as I go.

In answer to one of the questions above, the airplane will come in multiple liveries including bare-metal finishes - the more the merrier! :adoration:

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A quick screenie - just finished updating the Reporter's Pratt & Whitney R2800 twin radial engine, which will now be the turbo-supercharged version. Some better textures will be applied in the finished airplane, which will have removable engine covers and animated cowl flaps to allow the detail to be seen. Just some wires and cabling to add and she's done :)
 

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I've been busy this week conquering a few animation issues in FSDS 3.5.1, namely those governing undercarriage compression. It took me four days to master the process and eliminate axis errors, and about ten minutes to actually apply what I'd learned and get everything working the way it should. I needed to get the work done so that testing could begin on the FDE, due to the need for contact points to be applied.

Having got that little lot out of the way, I've spent several days applying the texture maps ready for the Reporter's first proper paint job. Bare metal will be used, and I've been looking closely at the default airplanes in FSX / P3D to understand how best to go about it. I also finished off the final touches on the engine, although I still need to close a few polygons up and tweak a few finer points.

Progress is going well though, and I hope to have some screenies soon of that bare metal in place :)

Texture mapping

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Engine pretty much finished

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Well, not too shabby for a first attempt :)

No bump maps or anything yet, just a basic crack at a bare metal finish. Certainly looks more like a proper airplane now.

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Does anyone know what causes this? The fuselage has a dividing line running from the nose to the tail that's just visible, as if light reflection is different for the two sides. I tested the model itself by applying the left side texture to the right hand side and reversing the X-axis and the line vanishes, so surface normals on the model are not to blame.

I'll be slitting the fuselage texture maps anyway, but I'm not sure this bug will go away - any ideas folks?

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dont have an answer for that,but im really looking forward to this plane,im wondering since that one company made the tacpac thing work in FSX/P3D.would someone be able to make a recce plane have cameras that would work?..meaning,you fly it as a recce plane,hit the cameras,and get screenshots of what below?..or in the side view,,cant remember the technical word
.
 
I think you are building in FSDS which I have never used but in the GMAX/3DS MAX world that normally happens when you've mirrored a fuselage half to make the opposite side and then not welded the vertices along the joint line.

Try selecting all the vertices along the joint line and then weld them with a radius of something like .010" (or however it's done in FSDS). That usually fixes the issue for me.
 
Daveroo said:
dont have an answer for that,but im really looking forward to this plane,im wondering since that one company made the tacpac thing work in FSX/P3D.would someone be able to make a recce plane have cameras that would work?..meaning,you fly it as a recce plane,hit the cameras,and get screenshots of what below?..or in the side view,,cant remember the technical word
.
Click to expand...

I seem to recall the original Aeroplane Heaven Grumman Panther included a photo recce version. It had a camera viewfinder function showing what the vertical camera was seeing. I don't think it showed what the oblique cameras picked up though. I may be wrong as it was a few years ago that I had the original freeware Panther.
 
Tako_Kichi said:
I think you are building in FSDS which I have never used but in the GMAX/3DS MAX world that normally happens when you've mirrored a fuselage half to make the opposite side and then not welded the vertices along the joint line.

Try selecting all the vertices along the joint line and then weld them with a radius of something like .010" (or however it's done in FSDS). That usually fixes the issue for me.
Click to expand...

The fuselage was created from a single cylinder, but I'll check the vertices anyway in case there's something there that I've missed. The booms also suffer from a similar, fainter line. I'll be texturing the tops and bottoms by splitting them into separate parts, so hopefully that might fix the issue.

@Daveroo I don't have any plans at the moment for active cameras, but the airplane will have functioning cowl flaps and removable engine covers to reveal the engines. Maybe something I could add later though as I know how to fit TacPack to aircraft using the SDK :)
 
Yes, this happens using MCX as well. The vertices are no longer welded. Dave Garwood helped me fix this on the T-33X project. oops TK beat me to it!
 
Just great stuff DC1973! Looking forward to the final product!

Martin Caidin wrote many books about WWII aircraft and histories of various WW-II planes in the 1970s. In one, don't remember which, he spent some words on the P-61, and quoted some USAF document that said the P-61, not the P-51, and not the F6F, was the "most maneuverable [US] fighter of WW-II". This due to the innovative spoilers and full span flaps, he said. And the two big giant engines. He was, apparently, a little over-exuberant in his praise of the P-61's performance, as he also was of the P-38, it turns out, but I devoured those books when I was a wee lad, and he had a role in my being a "fan", to this day, of those two planes in particular. That and the fact that they look cool. As to the aesthetic appeal of the P-61B/C vs. the bubble top P-61E/F-15, I always thought the plane lost most of it's great looks when they sawed off the top and put a bubble canopy on it. That stepped green-house canopy was cool!

Can't wait to try this one out in the sim!
 
Thanks PRB!

I think both airplanes look fantastic in their own way too, and to be building an airframe that has not yet appeared in FSX / P3D is an unusual but very welcome place to be. There can't be many types out there that nobody has ever released for flight sim after all these years.

The vertices on the fuselage are apparently fine ( it was a one-piece cylinder to start with anyway ). However, I noticed that FSDS sees the fuselage as two pieces, and no matter how many times I use the "Join Selected" function, the fuselage remains in two pieces. I've checked to make sure that no polygons are selected or hidden, but clearly something's not joining up correctly. I'll keep digging...
 
Problem solved :)

It was down to my own inexperience folks. I split the fuselage into four sections to test some multiple texture layers, and it proved very informative. The fuselage I had originally was fine but I had assumed that when mapping left and right, you had to use the whole section of map and could not combine that with selective sections of top and bottom mapping. D'oh!

The airplane's glossy, reflective texture set up compounded the problem also, and made it more obvious that the flaws where there when a matt finish and camouflage or similar might have hidden the "join" better. Finally, a large aluminium sheet overlaying the whole each external texture sheet emphasised the problem as the joins were not perfectly aligned. More time required on this for me, but all part of the learning process I suppose. Thanks to all who offered suggestions, onward and upward :)

Top texture applied as a test and the fuselage join line magically disappears. Model shown with engine bay exposed - the engine inside is a low-poly version of my Wasp radial.

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More progress now on texturing, after coming to a better understanding of texture maps. Bare metal always looks great and I've a long way to go compared to some of the other recent work-of-art posts here, but things are coming along nicely. Two shots, both in P3D v4, of the Reporter's left wing with bumps and basic bare metal texture - first without dynamic lighting, the other with. Is it me, or does P3D sometimes look better without the dynamic lighting?
 

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