I've had a heck of a time trying to get the textures for the jet fan blades onto the darn 'prop disks', as they're called....days of frustration with the textures looking beauty in gmax but showing up as black in FS9. Big-time lunchbag letdown. I was back and forth in max, the exporter - 'Middleman' and 'DXTBMP' about a hundred times easy, trying to fix my texture woes. Can't throw my hands in the air and walk away...this project's just started to come along. I've conquered some of the 'hard' stuff - got the top wing mapped and unwrapped decently, got all the wing parts (9 or 10) all textured just right. Been stalled on this friggin' jetfan thang for days now, determined to get them done and put to bed so I can keep texturing and animating the rest of the WASP. I've got a TON of work to do. Here's shots of the prop disk texture problem solved...finally, only by actually mapping AND 'UVW unwrapping' in gmax did the textures show up properly as DXT3 images of my lovely fan blades. The disks will be scaled to fit the engine nacelles, and the three disks will be merged, all occupying the same space. Only the appropriate, textured disk for each range of throttle is displayed by FS if this is done right, as you can see from the first three screenies...the displaced disks in FS9 at different throttle levels as engines are shut down. Thank God I solved this...it's been driving me nuts looking at 'black' textures on my jet disks for DAYS!!
Woohoo, now the jetfans are all done and I can see how many gray hairs it takes to clone a textured, animated wing properly. Just the texture template pattern on the wings so far - I have some work to do on the actual textures.
EDIT: May tone down the reflectivity on the spinner cone a bit....this thing's not supposed to be all chromey.
I've been putting off trying to clone/mirror the wing assembly...just been lazy about learning the tutorial for this. Not idle though, I've been playing with the cockpit glass and some of the interior details...the pilot is looking pretty decent, along with his seat and control pedestal. Now I'm looking at the best way to have the canopy move to allow pilot access. It's a bit goofy as I never set pivot points on the canopy pieces earlier. I'm finding that this pivot point XYZ restriction in max is a pain in the butt, and I'm slowly learning to set a 'workflow' in these projects....in other words I shoot myself in the foot often, creating more 'work' than may be necessary. Par for the course...I seem to learn most things the hard way. (Real life stuff, too.) D'oh! Well, just felt like rambling about my hobby...I'm off now to perfect (Ha ha, hopefully ) the canopy animation. Then more clone/mirror avoidance while I look at texturing and animating the weapons clusters. I really will have to get to reproducing my one wing assembly effectively though, getting that done will put a big scary job behind me so I can really feel that I've moved a lot closer to completing this very unique airbug, er...aircraft.
Thanks Mel, I post this stuff for two reasons...in hopes that it is somewhat interesting to see something unique as a work in progress, and to possibly inspire someone to look further into the possibilities of developing add-ons as a hobby. O.K., three reasons...I'm a bit of a show-off
I was fooling myself when I said I should tone back the teaser shots...making this stuff and posting W.I.P. shots is a lot of FUN!
WOOHOO! The canopy animation went pretty well. I wanted to have both sides open separately, moving back and spreading out but the animation axis' were too bloody much...she looks good with the whole mess just swinging up and back. What a buzzzz...the first time I've had a canopy open. Yayyyy.
Right on...well if it's that easy to do an interior model then I might just try it this time, instead of releasing an aircraft without a Virtual Cockpit as many newbies do.
Geez, if that goes well I might just find the balls to try my hand at designing a simple panel for this thing as well! Might not be too hard if I just steal all the pertinent gauges from a default FS9 panel.
Well isn't that special.....I have a tutorial on how to mirror animated parts in gmax but have had no success yet in getting the waspwing assembly to mirror without massive modeling problems. My stuff is either inside out in FS9 or it doesn't animate properly. I've mucked up somehow when I modeled this wing assembly, hoping to finish all the linking and animating for one and then simply clone/mirror the wingset to the right side of the aircraft. Simple? NOT! I can't follow the tutorial that would solve my problems as a mistake by me in the modeling process results in one vertice from several parts being left behind when mirroring the parts across an axis, resulting in a stretched cone extruded from the surface. After much trial and error, I am attempting the unthinkable......bringing in my left wing assembly from 'Anim8or' and trying to match the exact position and animation of the already done right wing - from scratch. All the parts in the new set have to be renamed, linked properly, positioned to right-angles first in gmax to set animated rotation axis' (2 different axis' for the wing assembly movement.), re-animated, re-mapped and UVWunwrapped...and it all has to match a fairly complicated leftwing animation and now slightly canted position. So far I've only managed to get the rightwing assembly imported into my scene in gmax, and positioned at the right angle to start animating on the proper rotation axis'. About 5 previous attempts to match the animations has resulted in me making a mistake somewhere along the process, and starting over with the rightwing as you see it in the shot below. Going to chip away at it today as I have time today...trial and error may get me to a point where the positions and animations of both wingsets match closely enough for this picky hack to call it DONE! I'm restless to move onto other aspects of this buggy beast, there's so much work to do.
If I can't manage to replicate the leftwings animations to suit, there are other fixes that I can attempt, working again with the mirroring process...I'm learning a heck of a lot, I'll get it somehow...have to....too much time in this project to give up or let it lie too long! Crap, if all else fails I'll start the whole wing process again, doing things differently by importing both wings from 'Anim8or' and doing up all animations for both sides at once and not rely on cloning/mirroring at all. I hate it when a project slows down with niggling problems like this, but through this sometimes tedious, frustrating process I learn a bunch and am better prepared for the next project.
OMG...I managed to pull it off I think. Followed a very careful procedure learned by 5 or 6 trial and error runs and got all the rightwing parts animated from scratch, and they are almost in perfect sync with the leftwing. Holy crap, I was sure this wouldn't work, but I kept going back in for another animation run, from start to finish and finally got 'er! Now I have to repeat all my texturing for the 10 or so wingset pieces, but what a relief to have two wings finally doing what they're suppose to in gmax...and they should look fine in the sim too...it was the mirroring operation that caused the parts to be inside out in the sim previously...the whole reason for this 'import and start from scratch' approach. DONE!! I'll spend a while getting this all textured up and move onto the twenty other things that need doing before I even get to final texturing, points, lights, packaging, etc.
EDIT: Haven't tried it in FS9 yet but am about to do an export test. If all is well then I know I'll spend the next while mapping and UVW unwrapping and texturing the wingset, just so it's out of my hair...it really will be a relief to finally have these wings done.
Thanks RD, I think you'll enjoy this one, it's obviously a very different aircraft. My export test went perfectly, and it's nice to see these wings working and showing up properly in FS9.
Oh oh, I guess I better make it run on something not so popular eh? O.K...it'll run on the sweat of corrupt politicians and lawyers...no shortage there. Hang on...do they ever sweat? ...Oh yeah, just ask Conrad Black's team...*muah ha ha haaaaa.*
You cannot post new topics in this forum You cannot reply to topics in this forum You cannot edit your posts in this forum You cannot delete your posts in this forum You cannot vote in polls in this forum You cannot attach files in this forum You can download files in this forum
FAQ
Search
Memberlist
Usergroups
Register
Profile
Log in to check your private messages
Log in
Big-time lunchbag letdown. I was back and forth in max, the exporter - 'Middleman' and 'DXTBMP' about a hundred times easy, trying to fix my texture woes. Can't throw my hands in the air and walk away...this project's just started to come along. I've conquered some of the 'hard' stuff - got the top wing mapped and unwrapped decently, got all the wing parts (9 or 10) all textured just right. Been stalled on this friggin' jetfan thang for days now, determined to get them done and put to bed so I can keep texturing and animating the rest of the WASP. I've got a TON of work to do. Here's shots of the prop disk texture problem solved...finally, only by actually mapping AND 'UVW unwrapping' in gmax did the textures show up properly as DXT3 images of my lovely fan blades. The disks will be scaled to fit the engine nacelles, and the three disks will be merged, all occupying the same space. Only the appropriate, textured disk for each range of throttle is displayed by FS if this is done right, as you can see from the first three screenies...the displaced disks in FS9 at different throttle levels as engines are shut down. Thank God I solved this...it's been driving me nuts looking at 'black' textures on my jet disks for DAYS!! 
