tkyler Posted March 16, 2011 Report Share Posted March 16, 2011 A few points:You don't have that same peace-of-mind with Activation.rather should be:I don't have that same peace-of-mind with Activation.because peace of mind is relative, I have plenty peace of mind with it even for the two software products I own that use activation....one over five years now, trouble free.But more than my desire to own those aircraft is my desire to NOT own payware with Activation.Absolutely... it's your own decisions that matter.We're simply dealing with different personalities that must be respected. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
dainja556 Posted March 17, 2011 Report Share Posted March 17, 2011 Absolutely... it's your own decisions that matter.We're simply dealing with different personalities that must be respected. Absolutely! You're running a business here. I expect you to do what you think is in the best interest of that business. If you feel that the Activation is more beneficial to your business than the additional customers you'd have if you didn't use it, you SHOULD stick with it. You'd be crazy not to, from a business perspective.If every plane I buy has some sort of Activation scheme and I buy twenty aircraft (not unreasonable over the course of a couple of years), that is twenty licenses I have to worry about breaking when I move computers or change equipment. I don't care for that. I like knowing that once I've paid for payware (and validated it if necessary), I'll never have to worry about it again.I'd feel the same way if the following wasn't true, but in my situation, I have to move computers a lot. I like X-Plane because it's happy running from a folder and doesn't have to be installed. I can keep it on an external hard drive and plug it into any computer, along with my USB gamepad, and play. I have no interest in some aircraft that phones home and denies me the ability to use an aircraft I paid for because I've already flown it on X number of other computers. Quite often when I'm on these other computers, I'm also in a situation where I have no internet access. That doesn't help matters either. Again, even if I had a "normal" lifestyle I would not want payware that required Activation, but that's one reason why it's not an option for me, even if I didn't mind it.I'm sure there are others that feel the same way. Obviously, there are others that don't care one way or the other. Either way, I've got no hard feelings at all!Anyways, sorry for the hijack. Please continue with the beautiful renders! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
tkyler Posted March 17, 2011 Report Share Posted March 17, 2011 Anyways, sorry for the hijack. Please continue with the beautiful renders!Not at all, you bring up valid concerns that other may have..and we'll probably relocate these posts soon anyhow...I've never been able to move a post where I want it so I'll see if I can get smarter admins to do it. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Ben Russell Posted March 17, 2011 Report Share Posted March 17, 2011 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Redfisher Posted March 18, 2011 Report Share Posted March 18, 2011 Ola....imagine a world where you can take these 3D pieces your building...and arrange them in Blender....and each object is a separate OBJ with it's own texture....and you can use all these OBJs in Blender to build a "scene"...and can export with one command..... and place that scene in WED with one click and your separate OBJs will actually sit on the ground....such a world is soon to be a reali....oh wait...you're on lightwave...nevermind!Jason...you're on drugs!The caravan...she's-a still alive! and getting attention again.[attachment=1Nice airplane!!! It looks like us LW guys need to start learning Blender from the ground up. Do you have any idea when this feature is coming? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
tkyler Posted March 19, 2011 Report Share Posted March 19, 2011 Oh I was just giving Ola a hard time, lightwave is fine. You can use Lightwave to model and texture...and then import your work into blender for arrangement and export. These features will be available a bit after V10 ships. We are developing the blender scripts and workflow as we work on V10 and documenting it. After V10 ships, we'll have to work on WED a bit to get it user friendly and then we have documentation to write. I'm also hoping to do a significant amount of video tutorials to demonstrate the system and workflow. We're all quite excited to have the community begin building x-world.If I were to give you any advice about organizing your work in lightwave...I'd simply say use as few textures as you can, pack as much into a texture as you can so that many objects share the same texture. We'll be providing a lot of "generic stuff" for scenery but really specific buildings will have to be custom...so it would be wise to cram as many buildings into one texture for a given area that you can. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Simmo W Posted March 19, 2011 Report Share Posted March 19, 2011 Sounds good Tom. Can't wait to see the new tools and features for scenery design. By your comments, it sounds like we'll be pretty much starting from scratch building this world, meaning that 9's scenery will look out of place/not as good as 10s? Or will good 9 scenery still fit in ok, except for having to correct the .lit texture reference, for global lighting? Or the new tools will speed up creation, like the cool looking terminal facades? So many unknowns I know, but gotta ask, as I find that scenery creation is a real huge investment in time right now. In fact I'm now taking a break, to do some.....flying. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
tkyler Posted March 19, 2011 Report Share Posted March 19, 2011 Simon.. I can't think of any reason ........EDITED: content removed Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Simmo W Posted March 19, 2011 Report Share Posted March 19, 2011 Thorough explanation Tom! I might have had my head in the sand, has this pretty major change, particularly use of blender for fine 3d placement rather than OE, been announced over at the org?Glad I now know Blender basics, although I am on a little 'scenery break' right now. At least people can do their Blender prep. ahead of release. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
tkyler Posted March 19, 2011 Report Share Posted March 19, 2011 has this pretty major change, particularly use of blender for fine 3d placement rather than OE, been announced over at the org?No....and I'm not planning on doing it either. As soon as I am able, it is my intention to make this venue THE place for serious development information. I've removed the content above as it was mostly intended to answer your question Simon....and even though we have shown a bit of scenery on xplane.com, we still are limiting the information we let out.It's' more proper to say that WED is a replacement for OE rather than Blender. Blender will be suitable for building very small scenes that you'll place with WED. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Gjalp Posted March 19, 2011 Report Share Posted March 19, 2011 Sorry for the weird question,I use Maya 2010...can I export to wavefront OBJ and then use WED to place in a scenery, or do I have to learn blender?Slainte,AndyNZCH Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
tkyler Posted March 19, 2011 Report Share Posted March 19, 2011 x-plane's 3D object format with the extension *.obj is NOT the same as the wavefront *.obj extension. The only 3D applications that have reliable x-plane obj exporters written for them are Blender and AC3D. You do not need to work in Blender if you work with sound "gaming" principles...i.e. polygonal modeling and UV mapping. Now I WILL say that the Wavefront OBJ format is one of the more reliable formats for getting your work into blender with textures intact....so for you, you're workflow would be model in Maya, export from Maya via wavefront OBJ (Lightwave LWO works well too) and then import your OBJ/LWO into blender so you can run the export scripts to yield a xplane *.OBJ format Once you have xplane's OBJ format, you can use WED to place.As much as everybody loathes blender initially, if you plan on doing any reasonable amount of modeling for xplane, there are several advantages to working with it. Once I get around to doing some tutorials though, I might be able to do some on alternate workflows. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Simmo W Posted March 19, 2011 Report Share Posted March 19, 2011 Great strategy Tom. You explain things well, so hopefully the scenery creation business can be further demystified, it's not that hard after LOTS of research. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
tkyler Posted March 20, 2011 Report Share Posted March 20, 2011 Well I just finished up my rough outline of tutorials and there's about 15 or so of them. So far, there will be four for scenery1.) An overview of scenery in xplane...hierarchy, file structure, elements of scenery and tools2.) Basic scenery creation using WED and the included library elements...no 3D needed.3.) Intermediate scenery.....basically custom 3D object creation4.) Advanced scenery, which covers the AG tile scene system, a bulk object exporter, conditional OBJ commands and orthophotos....(help Eric!)What I'd like is for folks to be able to just go through them and be able to get all the information in one spot. If nothing else, we'll have a "information desk" where I can direct people to the correct locations for resources. Once this gets up and running, I'm going to be pretty shameless about asking people to point in this direction when it comes to others wanting scenery or wanting to develop scenery. The time has come for scenery to get going in xplane. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Simmo W Posted March 20, 2011 Report Share Posted March 20, 2011 Finally. I bequeath my Sketchup tutorials if u want them. Exporting from SU to collada and then into Blender is easy and flawless from what I've seen. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Redfisher Posted March 20, 2011 Report Share Posted March 20, 2011 Well I just finished up my rough outline of tutorials and there's about 15 or so of them. So far, there will be four for scenery1.) An overview of scenery in xplane...hierarchy, file structure, elements of scenery and tools2.) Basic scenery creation using WED and the included library elements...no 3D needed.3.) Intermediate scenery.....basically custom 3D object creation4.) Advanced scenery, which covers the AG tile scene system, a bulk object exporter, conditional OBJ commands and orthophotos....(help Eric!)What I'd like is for folks to be able to just go through them and be able to get all the information in one spot. If nothing else, we'll have a "information desk" where I can direct people to the correct locations for resources. Once this gets up and running, I'm going to be pretty shameless about asking people to point in this direction when it comes to others wanting scenery or wanting to develop scenery. The time has come for scenery to get going in xplane.Which version of Blender are you going to be using in your tutorials?Hylan Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
tkyler Posted March 20, 2011 Report Share Posted March 20, 2011 3.8 man...3.8Seriously...I'm going to use 2.49b. That's what the scripts are for. If they get ported to 2.5b/2.6, the usage will probably be the same though so the information will still be valid. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Kieran Posted March 21, 2011 Author Report Share Posted March 21, 2011 A guy over at the .org, Sam256 I think, has been working on scripts for 2.5x. And I believe the usage is very different, he is also developing the current scripts to include manipulators.Cheers Kieran Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Redfisher Posted March 21, 2011 Report Share Posted March 21, 2011 A guy over at the .org, Sam256 I think, has been working on scripts for 2.5x. And I believe the usage is very different, he is also developing the current scripts to include manipulators.Cheers KieranI actually watched the video tutorial on this, I think. But then again, I've watched so many:) Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
tkyler Posted March 21, 2011 Report Share Posted March 21, 2011 A guy over at the .org, Sam256 I think, has been working on scripts for 2.5x. And I believe the usage is very different, he is also developing the current scripts to include manipulators.The scripts I'm referring to are for scenery and not aircraft.....the days of "one script fits all" is gone. It's possible these scenery scripts will get ported to V2.5 of Blender, but no idea when.For aircraft, I'm going to probably stay hard headed and stick with the aircraft scripts I use now....the original Marginal work, improved by BenR and BenS and possibly some other Bens I don't know about. They just work, like a hammer! ....though eventual porting to 2.5 would be nice to keep with the times and future improvements to Blender. It'll probably happen eventually. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Ben Russell Posted March 21, 2011 Report Share Posted March 21, 2011 ...and let me guess, everything still has .OBJ as the file extension? :-\ Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
tkyler Posted March 21, 2011 Report Share Posted March 21, 2011 AG scenes have a new *.agp file extension...the objects that make up the scene are OBJ of course. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Airbus Posted March 26, 2011 Report Share Posted March 26, 2011 A quick shot of another up coming aircraft. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
FlorianR Posted March 26, 2011 Report Share Posted March 26, 2011 nice, what aircraft is that? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
eaglewing7 Posted March 26, 2011 Report Share Posted March 26, 2011 Let me think a bit...Columbia 400, maybe...A Cirrus, maybe...Do we need more clues, yes. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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