OlaHaldor

I tried it at work a little bit before I went home. It has two 4-core 2.8GHz XEON, 6GB RAM and a GeForce 8800GT with 256MB RAM. Obviously, I tried the Lite version on this monster machine. It all went smooth up until short final. It started stuttering like nothing I've experienced before, and kept on doing that until I slammed into the runway. Yeah. Slammed. Ever tried to land an ERJ at 3fps?... I couldn't believe that my super crazy work horse would have such a hard time playing with this plane. So I went over to another airport. Yup, same thing there too. And another airport. No change. What on earth is this plane doing to my system? It's having a heart attack! When I got home to my PC where I usually fly, I went for the big guns. The regular version. Loaded at my WIP scenery Alicante, and was shocked by the crazy low FPS. I usually have about 60-70fps, even with the MU-2 I get something like that. But with the ERJ loaded I had 28-30fps. By all means, take-off and landing was no problem with this frame rate, I was just incredibly shocked by the sudden drop. Can't speak too much of how it is to handle though. This is quite simply another type of bird than I've flown since the days of MSFS9.

Um.. There's something strange about those screenshots. And it makes me go nuts. They look too real. Are you sure this isn't photoshopped? Did you cut and paste a photo of a plane into a XP screenshot ? Congrats, well done!

Just a minor update. I've modified and added and done some magic. A few minor details to add to the gate, and I'm all ready to duplicate it. Render to come.. A taste when the gates are in place..

My friend Alexander went to Spain and Alicante on Sunday. He told me the new terminal is almost done and is looking totally stunning. So I went ahead and got some photos from airliners.net to see how it looks. All the curves on the roof would prove to be quite a polygon monster, but with some testing I've found that I could reduce it from around 6000 to around 2700. What you see in the render below is a total of 6542 polygons, including the tower and the two terminals I've done earlier.. I still lack to add details and duplicate gates on the first terminals I built, but I'm quite satisfied with the poly count for now.

Been spending some time today to try and figure out how the gates are. I have ONE image of it, so it's a bit limited what I can do.. There's still a lot to do, like adding the stairs going down from it, but before I do that I must make the gate go downwards. I'll do that once I'm happy with the shape and details.

Kurv Studios is holding a two hour webinar about texture baking with LightWave 3D. Only $20.. https://www2.gotomeeting.com/register/155258394 Might be interesting even if you don't have LW3D.

A friend and I had plans to go to Alicante this weekend and I would be staying for a week, but due to the volcano on Iceland I might not be able to. All air traffic has closed down in Norway for the time being.

First go with the tower in place. Made some veeeeeery simple texturing to go with it to at least give you a feeling of what's going on.

The tower.

Last one before I'm off to bed..

Bingo !

Great stuff! Looking forward to those bumpy landings up north in Norway. ;D

A few more degrees to the south. They are building a new terminal as we speak.

I've had a few hours of spare time at work, so I got busy with LightWave and the CAD tools. I've barely started on the terminal. What airport is this ? Polycount so far, as depicted above: 1061

Goran. I officially hate you. ;D Not because of your being, but because of this super fast production line of good looking models you just seem to create like any kind of food processed to sh*t. And I still believe you're alien. Your time spent doing all those vs. Earth time is unreal. Have you started using Modo yet?

OK Terrence, I guess you're right. It just didn't make any sense to me to compare two planes in way different scales. But then again I've never claimed to be a rocket scientist. ;D 3D is some of what I do - texturing is usually not.

The reason I kicked on this comparison is that X-Plane has an upper limit of 2048px. So when you're going to texture the B747 - it won't really be a good sales point to say "we have a x pixels per meter", since it will drop dramatically the longer the plane is. By all means, I think the details in the SAAB is incredible and I think that alone stands by itself without making a joke out of others - which also is kind of a "shooting myself in the foot" strategy, like Microsoft and Apple does with their ad campaigns where they get blood on their hands for trying to kill each others products either directly or indirectly. So, how long is a MD11? How many pixels per meter could you make it have? Not as low as 37 I guess, but again - I'd rather see images than a whole lot of crazy bragging about it. Just my two minutes worth of time.

I love the fact that the fuselage will have great amounts of detail. BUT how is this comparable to a MD11? I know very little about the SAAB and MD11, but I think they don't compare well due to lenght?..

XP always looks like that at my place when the camera is too far down to the ground.

Lol Goran! Look, I'm not the only one saying "sweet". Stop bullying me for that. ;D The render looks good. I could easily believe the tail section was real. Looking forward to play around with this one at LEMU, if the runway isn't too narrow.

Drooooooooooooooool...

Yes, making stairs might get a bit poly heavy, but hey! If the scenario is relatively small and not so detailed anyway, why not add a few thousand polygons with those little things that makes the scenery really stand out! That's what I'm doing with LEMU, and I'm VERY happy with the feeling of taxiing in front of the largest hangars and see the stairs really pop out, and not being some flimsy texture on the wall. About texturing: I've mostly just done a one-click operation if I know I'm not gonna paint manually. So I make general textures as images and add to the model wherever it should be for planks, panels, roof shingle and so on, and render it in LightWave, to get the interaction of shadows and ambient occlusion. I render this directly to an image that saves it with the UV map. Render. Done. Apply to the X-plane object in Blender, and export to .obj. I can show you this process later on as well.

That's right guys. I had written a post, the information was wrong, so I deleted it. I know more about the situation now. The ambulance picked up a guy who's heart had stopped. And on the way to the hospital he went into a coma. They stopped outside my house to cool his body to make the heart stabile, and they considered to take him to the hospital with helicopter. Why they did not, I don't know. I know he's alive, but not well. I know his sons, and I feel really bad for them. I can only imagine how they must feel.

This was originally my answer to a question by another scenery developer. I did this for my LEMU scenery, and it could easily be done for any kind of building. The techniques can be used to build stairs, ladders, hand rails etc.. Software used: LightWave 3D and LWCAD plug-in. The plug-in is a must if you want superb precision along with great tools with loads of possibility to do whatever you can imagine. Spiral stairs http://vimeo.com/8898449 Fire escape stairs http://vimeo.com/8953964

Allright, I was up very late last night, so I didn't wake up until about 1300-1330 sometime today. And when I woke up, I was in shock. My heart was pounding, the house was shaking and there was an unbelievable noise outside. Then I suddenly recognized the sound. "HELICOPTERS!! " and I rushed to the camera bag, and then to the window. I expected to see 4-5 military helicopters. They fly through this valley from Ørland Flystasjon, a military facility housing a SeaKing, a bunch of F16 fighters and a few other helicopters. But it was nothing like I expected. But what I saw was this guy coming out. They had landed a helicopter 10-15 meters away from the house I live in. I rubbed my eyes like "wtf? is this true?" and went to put on some clothes to get a better view at the bird. And yup. There it was. Just around the corner.. You can see the entire series of photos here: http://www.olahaldor.net/fotograf/1001la/