Building a VC
To build a VC is frankly the most taxing part of the whole modeling process, imo. I had the good fortune to see some good pictures of projects when I was starting, so in the hope it helps here are some from my Tempest II project.
The aircraft model is built, it has wings, undercarriage, weapons etc but the cockpit is only a hole under the canopy.
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Form a cockpit shell as per Milton's C162 tutorial: this places the thing accurately and to the scale required. I've hidden the canopy meantime so it's not in the way.
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Build some "furniture" for this cockpit model, but since this is what's seen in
external views in the sim, there's no need to pile on the details - they won't be seen.
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Now clone this part of the model, this will be the basis of the VC. Build as much detail into this second cockpit model as you please, as long as you don't reduce CFS3 to a stuttering wreck!
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You now have a model with an exterior (fuselage, wings, gear etc), an external cockpit seen in external views in the sim and a detailed cockpit which is
only seen in VC mode. The external cockpit is linked to
cockpit and the VC is linked to
cockpit_virtual0, itself linked to
cockpits in the Gmax model.
View attachment 69930
The eyepoint, linked to
cockpit_virtual0 is placed where the pilot's eyepoint is likely to be in the VC part of the model.
Eventually Gmax gets rather sluggish while working with a complex model, so what we tend to do is save the VC as a separate model and work on that in isolation. Before exporting to CFS3, this separate model must be merged back into the main model.
Hope this helps