* Ron Lange -- Saturday 07 August 2004 00:02:
> 1. How are Materials and Textures handled? What about glass and lights 
> (strobes)?

For glass you can either assign a transparent glass texture (an image area
that is also transparent in GIMP, for example), or you can define the object
material as glass. I did the latter. You can find the material in bo105.ac
under name, surprise, "glass".
   Under Blender you can't really export all materials as you would like
them. That's why I post-process the exported ac-file with a Makefile. My
glass material didn't need that, though.

There are different methods to make lights (also see the thread "Aircraft
creation tutorial" from today). I used squares (made of two *explicit*
triangles -- otherwise plib would optimize them away) at location 0/0/0
with light texture (light and yellowish at the center, darker outside).
These squares (two for most lights) are then scaled up, depending on the
sun angle, and rotated as required, and finally moved at their places.
(see Models/bo105.xml). The Nasal script Models/bo105.nas turns the lights
on and off.



> 2. What about main and tail rotor (or fenestron in my case...), are the 
> pivots determined by the model or by fgfs-xml?

They are, of course, in the correct positions in the 3d model. But the
animation code (Models/bo105.xml) does again need the exact rotation
axes. I got this by selecting the proper vertices, moving the Blender
cursor there, and then displaying the coordinates on the console. For 
this I wrote a trivial Blender-Python script (-> attached; put it into
~/.blender/scripts/ and find it in Blender's File/Export menu.




> And how many rotor states could be used/ how are they stored?

You get the rotation angles for each blade from the FDM.
(rotation angle, flap angle, and incidence angle; see Models/bo105.xml).



> 3. How the *.rgb file is build up?

Put anything where you like it to be, and UV-map it. There's no
standard organization. GIMP can save RGB files, as can any KDE
graphics program beginning from version 3.3.



> 4. Is the interior just in the model or it is a separate layer or whatever?

There aren't really "layers" in ac3d (only object groups). But in your
graphics editor it is highly recommended to make intensive use of layers.
Yes, the interior is a separate layer in bo105.blend -- but not in bo105.ac.
You can, on the other hand, create the whole interior as separate *.ac file.
(I prefer all in one, also because people of other projects are interested
in the bo model, too. And they need the bo with interior in the same file. :-)



> 5. Any particular informations about spare parts? Naming conventions?

Spare parts? There aren't many conventions at all. You can name and organize
almost everything as you like. The object names are only used in the animation
code. If you name the rotor "ventilator" in the *.ac file, n the animation,
and in the FDM config, there's no problem.  ;-)



> PS: If anybody is interested in: I'll update the screenshot of the 
> growing ec130 at http://www.ron-lange.de/ec130_stage1.jpg

Looks quite nice already. Making the windows will be less fun, and take
away a little bit of the smoothness. That was my main problem, at least.
Easy to solve only, if you don't care for vertec

m.

Attachment: show_coord.py
Description: application/python

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