For anyone who wants to have a look at Earthview in action, I've made the first version available for download here:
http://www.flightgear.org/forums/viewtopic.php?f=6&t=15754#p153257 (I have the next higher resolution level textures as well, but they're too large to host for me). Anyway, this is really meant as an invitation to 3d modellers - I'm just fooling around with ac3d, I've no real idea how to use it properly - I guess you guys can do the chopping of the sphere into segments and the texturing of the segments much more precisely and thus get rid of the seams, or even introduce some smart texturing allowing higher resolution in the fly. This is just a really simple 3d model with fancy textures, so if you can do an aircraft or a cockpit, this should be a piece of cake! Please really feel free to play with it, because I'm not going to do much more, I want to get back to weather-making and just fly into space for recreational purposes :-) > Our space shuttle orbiter model (from many years ago) is incomplete, and > based on limited data from publicly available tech reports. I do have a > "J246" model that is a launch vehicle designed to place heavy payloads > into > orbit. That is incomplete, and awaiting some simple guidance for the > upper > stage to try and get it into orbit from the launch pad. A couple of years > ago Robin Gerard made a 3D model of that, as well as the pad. It will be > nice to see that fly someday. EEKPO has located the model, see http://www.flightgear.org/forums/viewtopic.php?f=6&t=15754&start=15#p153739 It's currently done with an ufo FDM, but the basic structure is all there, i.e. it loads into Flightgear and just needs the FDM inserted and possibly some controls/instruments to monitor ascent. So - it seems you could try it rather quickly :-) > I'm a new guy and I have to chime in on this our team wants to use FG > for simulations to orbit because we are actually trying to be the first > amateurs to make orbit and we would like to do HIL testing. FG may be > our only hope. If there is something I can do to help please direct me. Possibilities are endless - but quite possibly you'd like to do your own spacecraft at some point anyway, so I would suggest you study Vostok, fix it's issues (like the sound file problems) in the process so that you know how a multi-stage spacecraft model is done, then start making some other craft flight ready, and/or possibly start designing your own. > Using textures rendered from the scenery also allows to create > intermediate steps at a higher resolution. Ultimately it should be > possible to transition between the scenery derived texture and the blue > marble texture by generating intermediate stages, if not by cross-fading > them through a shader. Incidentally, some sort of cross-fading shader > would also be very useful to handle the day/night transition zones, that > should be quite evident when orbiting the planet several times each day. If anyone knows how to render textures from scenery, please do so - I don't know how to do it. Btw - we don't need any day-nigh transitions - the fact that Earthview uses a real sphere means that the sphere is actually illuminated correctly given the sun angle, the sun angle is determined by your real position, and so if the earthsphere is set to zero ambient reflection it gets you a rather credible day-night transition for free. Combined with the atmosphere light generated by the skydome shader which persists even after earth is dark, this looks really pretty :-) * Thorsten ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ This SF email is sponsosred by: Try Windows Azure free for 90 days Click Here http://p.sf.net/sfu/sfd2d-msazure _______________________________________________ Flightgear-devel mailing list Flightgear-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/flightgear-devel
