The Tone'ster writes: > It's not the I _really_ feel the need. > > It is just that the few 3d tools I have taken a look at, Maya, Blender and one > other one (can't rememeber the name, it was a bit ago) are complex to use. > > Harder, it seems to me anyway, than thinking in terms of edges and nodes in > some 0,0,0 centered 3d space, drawing it on a piece of paper, making a list of > nodes, and typing them in somewhere.
Tony, >From my relatively small experience with 3d modeling I will claim that an application like blender actually makes this a lot easier than doing it all by hand. 3d modelers give you all kinds of convenient little "tools" to create and manipulate your geometry. Yes, to be fair, the interfaces on these programs are complex and daunting. But, if you persevere and figure out the various modes that the application has and what all those little icons mean, plus a few undocumented/hidden key strokes, suddenly you have a rich toolset at your disposal and you can build models *far* faster and *far* easier and *far* more accurately than doing it all by hand. I would say that even if you are twice as smart as me [ok no comments here from anyone] :-) that you won't be able to just start up a program like blender and feel your way through it and start building models. 3d modeling is a lot more complex than word processing. You need to be prepared to read through a lot of documentation, and give yourself some time to go through the various tutorials, and be ready to ask questions. If you approach it with a bit of patients, I think you'll be pleasantly surprised how quickly things start making sense. > Having said that, it is probably my issue that I don't really _want_ > to learn a 3d modeling tool. And I'm here to say that you do want to learn a 3d modeling tool. :-) It's perhaps a little like broccoli ... no you don't want to eat it and it smells bad, but it's good for you, and after you force yourself a couple times, you might even start to like it just a bit, and after you get in the habbit of eating healthy, you might someday even start to crave it ... :-) > For FG, I would love to be able to put together a really simple 3d > model for the airframe, and a really simple 3d model for the > cockpit, where they only (for me) need to be good enough to get the > perspective out of the cockpit right (view over the dash, view out > the window while on base turning to final etc ...). As someone else said, if you *really* want to do things by hand, take a look at the ac3d model format. It's pretty self explanitory and if you have any questions, someone on the list here might know (or be able to figure out) the answer. But, I still think that once you learn how to use a 3d modeler, you'll be able to pump out even simple models 10x faster (maybe 100x faster) than doing it all by hand. :-) Regards, Curt. -- Curtis Olson IVLab / HumanFIRST Program FlightGear Project Twin Cities [EMAIL PROTECTED] [EMAIL PROTECTED] Minnesota http://www.menet.umn.edu/~curt http://www.flightgear.org _______________________________________________ Flightgear-devel mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mail.flightgear.org/mailman/listinfo/flightgear-devel
