alxunru

Already is and already has

The whole polytext thing definitely has its ups and downs. Our solution isn't perfect but for aircraft with large cockpits, where balancing texture resolution and performance is concerned, we like Guy, have gone the polytext route. I wouldn't necessarily call it a requirement for the tiny cockpit of the 737, and based on all of the previews that I've seen from Morten and crew, it certainly doesn't need it. Lovely panels there M

M 0.74...I stand corrected Thats what I get for looking up CR2 cruising speed on google!

You won't conduct a climb at 340 knots in a 777...let alone a regional jet. Your speeds are going to be as near as makes no difference 250 knots until 10000 feet, and then 290 knots for the climb till the mach transition (typically M 0.78 with the CR2) somewhere around 30,000 feet, atmospheric conditions depending. Cheers

Now I know...I should be working on the 777, but after giving Dozer a hand with some blender techniques, I was left with a set of windows and nothing attached to em. Two hours later and not actually wanting to go to bed even though I should have, this is what I'm left with. *shakes head* About all I can do is laugh Cheers

Old airplanes...like used cars. You never know what you're going to get in the cockpit. All part of the fun haha!

Goodness...I must be living under a rock. No idea you were working on this one. Model is looking fab!

Thank you and my pleasure

Garrettm30, Check this out. http://www.xpjets.com/2010/05/30/so-what-the-big-deal/ We go into comparison of with vs without normal / specular maps and try to show some of the ways that the effects can be used to enhance the appearance of an aircraft Cheers Alex

Great little read. Glad to see that you came to the same conclusions in the creation of normal maps that I came to for our purposes. I must be doing something right after all It really does add a new dimension to aircraft rendering in the sim. Thanks for sharing! Alex

Not to drag the topic of artifacts on, but I have had a bit of experience with the marching ants issue in the development of the 777. When normal maps first came out, I experimented with them and noticed the artifacts immediately on areas of the mesh that once had been clean. There were artifacts in strange places, like the tip of the nose, a couple of polygons on the top of the wingroot, and some on small details. Turns out (and I've confirmed this with Supnik), that these artifacts are the result of faces being mapped on edge, ie a line representing one polygon. The video card can't make sense of the normal mapped surface and sure enough, it spits out garbage. The severity of the effect is dependent upon lighting conditions, sun position, intensity etc. Here is what Supnik told me a couple of months ago in response to my inquiry. Take this a step further, its actually pretty easy to fall into this problem with the publicly available set of Blender scripts simply due to the sims rampant growth. Take a small antenna. More than likely I'm just going to planar map it as I'm not terribly concerned with distortion at that small size. If I've finished off the top of the antenna to be smooth, I'll have several vertices that are likely to be very close together. Consider that I'll be using a small texture area (call it the same pixel area that I would have mapped this to on a 1024 sized map) on a 2048 map. Blender's export scripts only export UV coordinates to four decimal places (believe me, I'd love to have 5 for the UV coords). That gives you 10000 possible coordinates across a 2048 pixel surface. That sounds like plenty, until you have vertices that are closer to one another than 0.2 ish of a pixel. Doesn't take much math to realize that by increasing your texture resolution from 1024 to 2048, you've effectively halved your UV coordinate resolution. The exporter will round your tightly packed UVs off to the nearest decimal, and because of that they can be plotted to the same texture space. It is why the tip of the 777 nose and tip of the screwdriver tail exhibited the marching ant syndrome. If you UV map intelligently, these kind of pitfalls can be avoided relatively painlessly. You might need to do a little bit more texture work, but the final textured surface is always going to be better off for it. And do note that you're only ever going to see these artifacts if you have a normal map in place. No normal map, no problem. Here's a quickie test to demonstrate more or less whats going on. Hope that this helps people out Cheers Alex

oh hello ;D Awesome comes to mind. Fabulous texturing! Cheers Alex

Made me laugh

Haha, I believe it lol. Looks great!

It took a little longer than we had thought it would, but we've finally got a cut of something presentable. I'll let the video do the talking Enjoy! Alex

Looks like shading where the aileron gap is. Most likely a combination of the shading on the model from the sim and the subtle shaded textures.

Yum on all counts.

Just waiting for Frontier to finally decide to fly to KCPR from KDEN...then I could really fly on one of these bad boys. Granted we've been waiting since Lynx / Frontier bought Q400s for CPR DEN service. The old United Q200s just aren't as much fun Wings and engines are looking sharp! Cheers Alex

And I thought that building the T7 overhead was bad. Definitely something to be said for 30 years of streamlining. Fab job Just out of curiosity, what kind of poly counts are you getting in the 3d cockpit so far? I'm starting to notice a fps slowdown with my unfinished T7 cockpit. I'm sitting around 111000 polys in Blender...so close to double that for obj triangulation in the sim. Have lots of work yet to do so I may need to cut here and there. Cheers Alex

Haha I can believe you there. I once delayed a release by ten days because I wanted to render out a minute long animation for a promo video. Needless to say, my poor iMac G5 chugged along for 7 days straight, one frame at a time. Couple that with post production and then the time to set up the animation in the first place. Granted for stills, its easy enough if you have a light rig set up to push 'render' before going to bed Looking forward to it. Alex

Not so sure if they're oversized static wicks. Just did a bit of research and the spear tubes on the wingtips are actually HF antennas. Model is looking great! Alex

They're on their way out too. A sizable number of the northwest CRJs are already in new delta colors. Won't be long now Painting the livery would be a nice tribute...granted I'm biased. Delta nuked our Northwest Minneapolis flight from Casper, WY. Shame too...was easily one of our best flights out of town. Reminiscing about the good ol days aside, liveries are looking great javier!

Haha! Yes, I've had my fair share of experience with UAL lately. What can I say...I love the livery (new and old), love their terminal at my nearest hub (KDEN), and love the convenience of being able to jump on a Q200 from home and be anywhere in the country within relatively few hours. I can't say the same about the quality of the experience flying with them, but then again, I suppose that I shouldn't expect much either, especially with the United States aviation climate as it is. At this point I'm justified in saying that its a tolerable flight as long as the pilots have channel 9 turned on And back to topic, the liveries are lookin' hot javier!

Looking awesome there Javier. I'm getting cramps and claustrophobia just looking at it lol (the 200 is a miserable plane to be stuck on as a passenger). You've captured her quite well sir! Alex