@stingray_SIX_TWO said in WIP: F-14 B/D:

Textures are coming along nicely I think you guys will like the result, just takes some time as my model is a bit more complex than I’d like for unwrapping

Hey Stringray! Long time no see. When I used to work on Vdrift, I was trying to use blender’s unwrap command for texture mapping and someone there told me about “project from view”

It’s been a hot minute since I’ve used blender, but IIRC, back on an older version the menu was triggered by pressing the U key -> “project from view”, then you could project the UV coords from a viewport. That, combined with orthogonal projections and being able to rotate the vp in steps with the num pad made texturing much easier.

If you’re using 3ds for this, I unfortunately have no experience at all

I hope everyone has been doing well!

@molnibalage:

https://www.benchmarksims.org/forum/showthread.php?20345-Korea-80s-Theater

But catapult take off does not work for players.

I got catapult takeoff to work by making sure nothing other than a than a sidewinder or pod were on my glove stations. I think the coordinates of one of those stations is way wrong and causes the plane to violently nose down on launch.

Pardon the necromancy, but I just recently had the free time to try out this procedure. Pretty Cool!!

@gza036:

Just wish this pit had instrument lights at night

I had luck just pressing <shift>+ <alt>+ c to toggle the interior flood lights from Off -> Low -> High

If you want the older integral red lighting you can drop this line into your 3dckpit.dat
floodlightcolormod 1.0 0.2 0.2;

iirc they went to an add-on green flood lighting when the pilots started using NVGs</alt></shift>

@BeakerVBA:

…Although everything does eventually get converted to quads, working in triangles makes it very hard to maintain a smooth shape for the rendering engine to shade.

You mean: “everything does eventually get converted to triangles” right? BMS doesn’t have any adaptive tessellation, does it?

Stringray: To smooth things out I usually try to select a patch of vertexes then w -> smooth. That might help with the ripples. Are you using the edge-split modifier? If so, are there any edges unintentionally marked sharp?

Also, might be a good idea to keep a super high-res mesh around in case BMS adds normal mapping at a later date (again, they don’t do that yet, do they?). Then the normal map could be baked from the high res mesh, then applied to the lower res one. Though I wonder if panel seams might be the best case for using normal maps in flight sims. Might even be able to get away with just using a monochrome bump map for those.

@stingray_SIX_TWO:

Dude I have no clue how to model a human let alone a pilot [emoji23].

Either way when I rendered the model with the transparent canopy I too was thinking ‘Im gonna need some crew soon’.

I know something about this.

Here’s how i set up for mirrored modeling, this might be the same way you do it. Start with a cube, then tab for edit, k for cut, z for cut through, then hold ctrl to bisect straight through across the X axis. Then I delete the vertexes on one side of the bisected cube, then add in the mirror modifier so that what you do to one side will happen on the other.

After I get that set up out of the way, it’s mostly k to cut lines and faces, which ups the vertex count, then move vertexes around until I get them in the right place. The only ones to move carefully are the ones right on the axis that you’re mirrored across, since if they get too far off the axis there will be a gap. Start with the body then e for extruding legs and arms. If you extrude anything along the mirrored line it will also generate a face on the inside of that line which you’ll have to delete at some point, or it will mess up the vertex normals a bit until you do.

Most of the modeling I’ve done has been low poly. With the poly-count that you’re going for the Subdivision Surface modifier will likely be the way to go. I’ve heard in a few places that, with SubSurf, you mostly want to build your mesh out of squares and try to keep the triangles to the minimum. Don’t worry if all the points on your squares don’t fall on the same plane, the squared mesh is just a control cage for the SubSurface mesh you’re building.

I’m pretty sure you got this dude! Go be better than me at modeling humanoids as well!!

Damn that is sexy!!

…

!!!

Beautiful work man!

I’d like to make a request for your next shot. Pick any angle you dig and press 5 on the num pad, then mouse-wheel distance, to get a perspective corrected shot. That will make my graphics-tart heart skip a beat!

More MLG pics - hopefully this will work ok.

same as SEG’s but a slightly different angle

Saw this one though and it looks like the hydraulic piston here is compressed, but in the mesh it looks extended. Maybe that’s an issue? Idk, still can’t really wrap my brain around how this massive thing gets so flat.

My aviation museum closed a few months ago.

random Off Topic neat time lapse video, right around 1:50 it gets to the SR-71 tear down, the F14D is visible in some shots.

last time I drove by the D was still there.

more On Topic Vid series:

Read a paper a week ago saying that to update the cat for NVGs compatibility all they did was add a few filters to things, and then illuminate the whole cockpit with add-on green flood lighting, and just left all the older red & white lighting in place and the aviators just didn’t use it anymore. Can 't seem to find it at the moment though.

[edit] looks like it was Night Vision for the F-14 Tomcat by Mike Rabens , the guy up there ^

@Arty:

example if your model is 3 parts lets say and have one texture per part it will be at least 3 drawcalls. If it’s one it will be one.

In case I was unclear, separate textures also (typically) mean additional draw calls in the gl4 stuff I’m familiar with. Thanks Arty for pointing that out! But the multiple textures can be combined into a single big texture with lots of discrete areas for different bits and that should, ehm err, could reduce it to a single call.