SurClaro Flight Simulator Resources

Posted: Tue Jun 27, 2006 11:24 pm Post subject: Low-polygon pilot a challenge...

Hi folks, I don't know how many people are interested in this stuff, but I was determined to have a decently modelled pilot for my latest aircraft, as my last few pilots had considerably high polygon counts and ended up being unuseable on my low-end PC due to sickening frame-rate hits. Trust me, it's lunchbag letdown to have to delete a pilot, chair and interior, and make the windows opaque in order to fly the thing. It's a little (lot) harder to keep the poly's low and still depict the shape you want to effectively, whether it's a pilot, object or the aircraft itself. The best developers seem to keep the poly's low and make up for the lack of detail anywhere they can with artful, clever texture jobs. Look closely at some of the details in your FS aircraft and you'll see what I mean. Is that indent there or is it just clever shading on the bitmap applied to a flat surface, etc? Anyway, to stay on topic, look at the high-poly pilot screenshot below. As my modelling skills are still developing, (and always will be), I have been relying on a technique available in my primary 3D modelling program 'Anim8or' called 'Lathing' in order to easily make complicated or difficult shapes. The high-poly pilot's torso and head was a curved outline, lathed and then squashed into submission. I then pulled certain faces and points away from the main body and did what I could to emulate arms, legs and feet. Not only were the results unsatisfactory, the polygon count was brutal and I still would have had to subdivide the 'faces' of his arms in order to bend them at all (more poly's). Shocked

I decided to work smarter this time and started with a primitive rectanqle, subdivided once (sometimes called 'smoothing', subdividing a 3D rectangle results in a pillow, or chiclet shaped object, still nice and low poly). I then simply extruded selected faces in as many segments as required, resulting in low-poly arms, hands, legs and feet that can be point and face-edited into further submission to mimic the real thing. Then the whole object was subdivided or 'smoothed' once more (every face seen in the middle pic divided into 4 more faces) and further , refining face and point editing complete the object. Note that the right hand-shape is set to hold a joystick, while the left is meant to be curled palm-down around a sliding throttle. I am currently modelling in Anim8or (Freeware) and importing into Gmax for some object placement, scaling and the texturing. This guy/gal will soon have a custom seat made for him and all will be inserted with care into the cockpit of a unique, futuristic multi-role fighter.

Edit: (click on .jpegs bottom to top)

Posted: Sun Jul 09, 2006 3:41 pm Post subject:

Hi again, I had a bunch of free time this weekend and was playing around with my fighter pilot and chair, etc at 4:00 am, and things went well. I decided that rather than try to apply a face texture to the head that I had modelled, I would build a full helmet and avoid the intricate texture worries in gmax. I may even cheat when it comes to this pilot by not texturing it at all and just relying on 'materials'. 'Materials' are easy to create and apply in Animator and in gmax, but gmax materials will show dynamic shine more effectively. I'll have to tackle more detailed texture creation and application in gmax soon, but I'm trying to balance the learning curve with the desire to keep the enthusiasm with the project and it's momentum fresh (I really want to finish this bird up and just enjoy flying it around, so far it all imports to FS2002 beautifully and looks pretty darn cool). And my frame rates with all objects included are great so far, and all I really need to do now is keep the landing gear low-poly for a smooth simming experience. Oh yeah, can't forget about adding weapons, it is a fighter so she'll need guns and missiles.

DONE:
-Pilot, chair mostly modelled, helmet has interim 'materials' applied

-Main aircraft modelled

-Cockpit well interior mostly modelled

-Jet engine 'fan' blades modelled and placed

-Jet engine exhaust nozzles modelled and placed

-FS import friendly so far (the exhaust nozzles wouldn't go in due to co-linear vertices so I just cheated and checked the 'Ignore Warnings' box in 'Middleman' as I exported a .mdl file through 'makemdl' from gmax)

TO DO:
-Consider putting oxygen feed tube coming out of pilot's mask

-Texture or assign 'materials' to rest of pilot

-Place pilot and chair assembly in cockpit properly, after deciding on appropriate pilot-to-aircraft scale.

-Model some sort of a split panel, to the right and left of pilot, he needs to see down through the lower window at the nose of the fighter, between his feet.

-Decently texture whole aircraft (still learning)

-Learn how to animate jet engine 'fans', tied properly to both engines RPM. (The FS2002 SDK's [Software Development Kits] are crucial here)

-Detach faces for landing gear doors, reverse-extrude wheelwells

-Make decision regarding type of gear, model it and figure out how to animate it (*deep sigh*)

-Figure out and apply the spinning tire effect in gmax (or wimp out and do X-Wing style gear)

-Almost forgot again that I have to arm this bird with guns & missiles

-Keep it all export friendly and low-poly, set the final scale of aircraft in the sim'

-Determine weight, thrust and general aerodynamics of aircraft in .cfg file (all stolen from other aircraft and tweaked, lotsa fun)

-Balance thrust with full stop braking strength in .AIR file and aircraft.cfg file (I hate third-party airplanes that won't sit still on the runway, don't you?)

-Determine and place all contact points properly with .cfg file using the 'temporary lights to indicate exact location of points' method

-Choose the 'real', permanent lights for my bird and place them with the .cfg file (can't wait to try the cockpit lighting, only the effect of the light is visible, not the light itself, hope that you don't have to model the virtual cockpit to see this effect, as VC's are a whole other can 'o' worms)

-Bug RD for his afterburner treatment and get the almost complete file to him for his contribution

-After completing all of the above to my satisfaction, time to figure out how to zip it all up and recruit a few folks to test general performance and compatability in FS2004 (I am running FS2002 still)

-Actually upload the thing to 'Fictional and concept aircraft' here at Surclaro, hope for acceptance of file to the site (if people can upload teapots I think I'm O.K. there)
Laughing

-Grow a thick skin in anticipation of the occasional "There's no V.C. or flap animation, dummy, what are you doing?" kind of comments Shocked

-Just enjoy flying my own creation around FS, taking cool screenshots along the way Very Happy

EDIT: In the middle shot I also see that the outside faces (or poly's) of that ejection box framing the chair could be merged for the most part, cutting down the poly count further. I also still have the pilot's head modelled underneath that helmet. I can 'loop-cut' most of his head off as it's not visible underneath his lid.

Posted: Mon Jul 10, 2006 1:25 am Post subject:

found this maybe it will help

If a jet aircraft rolls with the brakes off at 0 throttle, or has trouble slowing down on
approach, the problem is usually with record 1503. When you open it and see the
table, the first number at the top left is usually over 60. This should be 55 or less.
Depending on the aircraft, it may be a lot less. This is the percent of N1 that you get
when the throttle is at 0.
That some jets don’t roll at 0 throttle, with the N1 set to over 60, tells me that something
is wrong with the way the flight simulator is set up. What real jet aircraft will stand still
with the brakes off and the N1 reading 60% or more? At the moment I don’t know if it is
actually a problem with the simulator, or more a problem with how different gauges for
N1, have different readings, with the first number of record 1503 at the same setting.
An example is the N1 gauge in the default 737-400 reading near 20% at idle with the
1503 first number set to 55; while that same number will give an N1 reading of 55% with
the gauge that is part of the F-15 panel by Chuck Dome.

Posted: Mon Jul 10, 2006 3:15 am Post subject:

Right on, thank you. These valuable tidbits of info help, as there is documentation for all this developer stuff out there, it's just that it's in 20 different places around the web. I don't actually mind a jet that starts moving forward on the runway once the brakes are released, but it drives me nuts not to be able to hold it still with brakes applied, or an aircraft that never really comes to a full stop with full brakes upon landing. As much fun as modelling is, tweaking the characteristics of the aircraft is a blast too. When you get decent at it you feel like a bit of a 'virtual' mechanic/engineer. Pretty neat stuff for this noob. Looking forward to fooling around with the numbers provided, thanks again. Smile