SurClaro Flight Simulator Resources

[harkonnen]

Sorry, I put this here as I didn't want to bump the Mike Stone thread in 'Add-ons Developers' so soon...a little respect. :wink:

Anyway....@ RD and G.S., woohoo, this unwrap is nice when applied to the model. Sorry but the airbrake panel wouldn't edit cleanly in the unwraps that I tried. The two panels and the main body are different meshes in gmax, and subsequently, mostly due to my noobness, the two will have to be painted separately on different bitmaps. No biggie...we'll just keep that area of the car a solid colour, unless you want to try matching up fancy lines or whatnot between two maps. :oops: :roll: Overall it will be a nice easy paint for the top and sides as you can see from the little sample bitmap. Had to scale the bottom part down to fit it all on but most of it is covered by the thruster path anyway. I'll have some work to do before I get a package to you. A fair bit actually, I have to work up the pilot paintjob, and also custom-create the generic interior textures. FDE is great but also still have to set points and lights.

P.S., Never mind the shine on those airbrake panels....I never bothered to change down that alpha channel for this particular test, it's the difference between 176 and 211 on the alpha greyscale for reflectivity.. We'll make sure everything is matched up as we get to that stage.

[groundsquirrel]

Oh yeah! If anybody remembers my Bel-Air Cessna, you know what I want to do to this baby. :)

[rd]

Cool Hark, looks good. Love the template, 1,000,000 x's better than the Maelstrom :wink:

GS, I remember that for the cessna contest. Did you ever get the three chrome accents painted on the nose???

Can't wait to paint this one.

RD

[harkonnen]

I was starting to think about how to tackle some of the interior textures. Wanted to have speakers in my hotrod and actually tried drawing them in a bitmap. Uhhhh...didn't go so well trying to render speakers, and I'm not much for scooping other peoples textures, or snagging images from the net...I really enjoy doing all my stuff from scratch. The solution? Model what I want to see in 'Anim8or' and take a screenshot, to be further manipulated in my maps.
One is meant for sub-woofers and is supposed to have the circular accent lights you see in the tricked out 'rods. The other is meant to be a smaller door speaker and there will be as many as I can put in and have it look right. Better than drawing them with a bloody mouse, eh?

[harkonnen]

Things went reasonably over the weekend trying to make progress on this aircar. Defining "reasonably" would all depend on the patience level of the person saying the word, and I must have some serious patience because I literally spent most of Sunday mapping, unwrapping and exporting one mesh, the bloody pilot's head! Must have tried 20 times before I gave up actually UVW unwrapping this poly-heavy mesh (mess!) and decided to just slap a texture on it the easy way and then manipulate the actual positioning on the bitmap itself. After a day and a half there isn't much more to see than the fact that he has skin tone and a baseball cap. I still have to try for a better skintone in all light situations...and I have to draw a mouth on the face. (At least it's all in position and situated properly...gmax can be very frustrating sometimes, moving and rotating maps within the program sometimes results in NO CHANGE at all in the sim!) :?: :roll: At least now if you want a little John Deere logo on his ball cap you can do it. :wink:

I modelled two inner interior panels to put the speakers, etc. on....the existing panels were scaled down too far for a decent image-slap-and-shrink when I unwrapped them with the main body.

I have to reposition the head slightly and work on the hair paint job.
Need to map & unwrap the console and inner airbrake well walls. Already mapped & unwrapped the dashboard and the two above-mentioned panels.

I had to adjust the .cfg file slightly to improve stability at top speed. Seems I had the 'Pitch Stability' set a bit high. At least I think that's what was causing the slight, occasional speed-wobble, it seems way better now.

I want to add an editable licence plate.

Seems like baby steps, but I am actually much closer to doing the actual painting of all these model parts, and finally setting points and lights.

I don't have any current screenshots taken but will post a few soon if something I'm yapping about could use some illustration.