• Which the release of FS2020 we see an explosition of activity on the forun and of course we are very happy to see this. But having all questions about FS2020 in one forum becomes a bit messy. So therefore we would like to ask you all to use the following guidelines when posting your questions:

    • Tag FS2020 specific questions with the MSFS2020 tag.
    • Questions about making 3D assets can be posted in the 3D asset design forum. Either post them in the subforum of the modelling tool you use or in the general forum if they are general.
    • Questions about aircraft design can be posted in the Aircraft design forum
    • Questions about airport design can be posted in the FS2020 airport design forum. Once airport development tools have been updated for FS2020 you can post tool speciifc questions in the subforums of those tools as well of course.
    • Questions about terrain design can be posted in the FS2020 terrain design forum.
    • Questions about SimConnect can be posted in the SimConnect forum.

    Any other question that is not specific to an aspect of development or tool can be posted in the General chat forum.

    By following these guidelines we make sure that the forums remain easy to read for everybody and also that the right people can find your post to answer it.

FSXA GMAX Hose Animation

Tako_Kichi

Tako_Kichi

Messages
455
Country
ca-ontario
Has anyone found a way of animating a brake hose in GMAX as I am really struggling with this concept at the moment?

I have tried an animation using bones, another one trying IK animation and a third where I manually moved the various pieces.

In the first two above I will readily admit my knowledge/skill levels are sadly lacking as I don't fully understand the methods/use yet. In the last one which I just tried I discovered that you can't just convert a spline I created to make the path into poly object and then try to animate it as a whole piece as moving a few frames in the animation moves the entire part and when you reset the various polys and move the animation slider again you lose whatever you had previously set. It looks like I will have to detach the polys in sections to do an animation that way so that I can move the various sections of the hose independently of each other (i.e. upper section, mid section and lower section).

Just for clarity my situation is this:

My brake hose is connected at the lower end to the brake caliper and at the upper end to a bracket on the UC leg where it connects to the 'hard' brake line. At about the mid-point in the hose it is connected to the UC scissors via a rubber bushing and a bracket. I have 'attached' the hose to the upper scissor so that it moves along with the scissors as the oleo compresses/decompresses. What I need to do is to animate the two ends of the hose so that they stay connected to their respective mating parts (i.e. the caliper and UC leg bracket) as the oleo goes up/down.

I have attached a couple of screenshots, the hose is the purple part.

Hose-2.jpg

Hose-1.jpg


I have searched for information on this problem but not found a solution as yet. Does anyone have any tips/suggestions on how I can achieve my goal?

I wish you could animate a spline and have the mesh follow it as that would solve my issues but I guess that's not possible and it certainly wouldn't appear in FSX as splines don't show.
 
Tako_Kichi said:
I wish you could animate a spline and have the mesh follow it as that would solve my issues but I guess that's not possible and it certainly wouldn't appear in FSX as splines don't show.
Click to expand...

Select your spline and look at the Mesh Settings. Set a suitable Thickness to match the actual thickness of the hose and tick Display Mesh - the spline now looks like a hose but still won't display in FSX. Now put an Edit Mesh modifier on the stack and FSX will show the hose. You can play around with number of sides, vertex type etc until it's as simple or complex as you want.

Build your animation by animating the spline's vertices, but don't touch the Edit Mesh modifier. Let us know how that goes...!
 
Hi Tom, I spent all afternoon and evening messing around trying to do what you described in as many different ways as possible but I just can't get it to work.

At first it looked like it was going to but at some point I lost the ability to animate the vertices in the spline and I have not been able to animate a spline since. I have even started a new file and merged all parts into it, deleted the line and remade it (several times) and everything else I can think of but the animation refuses to work correctly. I have also restarted GMAX and restarted the computer several times in case that was the problem.

I start at frame 100 and move the slider to frame 110 then move the vertices and make sure the frame/verts is/are 'keyed' but if I move the slider back to frame 100 the parts remain at the position they were set to in frame 110.

:confused::mad:
 
Last edited:
I understand that the FSx exporters do not process vertex-level animations.

The only two ways I can think of doing a hose animation would be

The truly masochistic way:
#1 - multiple parts (think cartoon cells) at each keyframe is a copy of the main hose, part - modelled to the desired shape, and with a visiblity condition. The number of parts needed would depend on how "jerky" you do NOT want the overall effect to be.


The annoyingly masochistic way:
#2 - make the hose multiple segments and use bones.... very much trial an error to get the segments not looking out of place.
 
Sorry Larry, it doesn't work with me either. Bother. Back to head-scratching again. :(

The animation not 'taking' in Gmax is almost certainly because you don't have the Animate button clicked - the button and time slider bar will turn red when it's on.
 
The only vertex animations supported by FSX are driven by bones.

To do this, you would need to create the hose using the spline as above.

Use an appropriate FSX material with Skinned Mesh checkbox ticked

Use a Skin modifier on the top of the stack and add representative bones, edit the skins envelope so that these drive the animation the way you want.

Animate the bones using whichever method works best

Collapse to discrete keyeframes

Export including the skinned mesh and animation checkboxes.


Sent with Tapatalk for iPhone
 
I've seen what you want to do in FS9 (which doesn't support skin & bones animations) and had a look at the source file. It depends how accurate you want to be with the animation and how closely you expect the user to look!

You could have the hose divided into two objects at the bushing/bracket and rotate each piece to achieve the effect: Milton did that with the FS9 Grizzly. Whether the animation ends up accurate enough only you can judge.

Or you can go the skin & bone animation route and you'll get complete fidelity, but will this actually be noticed? Bear in mind the movements are going to be quite rapid in the sim and I think most will not be able to see how pinpoint accurate it is. Again only you can judge, but I think Gibbage's horseshoes and handgrenades analogy is a useful reality check.

Have fun! :)
 
hairyspin said:
The animation not 'taking' in Gmax is almost certainly because you don't have the Animate button clicked - the button and time slider bar will turn red when it's on.
Click to expand...
The animation button was clicked and the screen border and slider bar were red when I was trying to animate it.
 
hairyspin said:
I've seen what you want to do in FS9 (which doesn't support skin & bones animations) and had a look at the source file. It depends how accurate you want to be with the animation and how closely you expect the user to look!

You could have the hose divided into two objects at the bushing/bracket and rotate each piece to achieve the effect: Milton did that with the FS9 Grizzly. Whether the animation ends up accurate enough only you can judge.

Or you can go the skin & bone animation route and you'll get complete fidelity, but will this actually be noticed? Bear in mind the movements are going to be quite rapid in the sim and I think most will not be able to see how pinpoint accurate it is. Again only you can judge, but I think Gibbage's horseshoes and handgrenades analogy is a useful reality check.

Have fun! :)
Click to expand...
Yup Gibbage is absolutely right with that analogy. :D

I have studied more photos and found a much easier routing for the hose so I may be able to split it into parts and animate the normal way. Almost every photo I looked at had a different way of routing the hose and it seems like the various mechanics used their own method depending on hose length available when it came to converting the brakes from drums to discs.

The other evening I looked at every aircraft in my FSX install using MCX to animate the models and very few had the hoses animated, most didn't even have the brake lines/hoses modelled at all (and I know why! :rolleyes:) but as they are so prominent and noticeable on this aircraft it would look odd if they were not there.

Oh well, back to playing with parts....lol. ;)
 
1NewImage.jpg



Doing Boned animations gets easy once you see what your working on, hit f4 so the mesh is visible

2NewImage.jpg


Use the weight tool to reset the level of influence each bone has on its set of vertex and that of the next ones in the chain, powerful tool for making adjustments quickly.

Adding keyframes manually is the easy way to do it , instead of using auto key try using the set key button instead , and set the key filters so only position is active , or rotation or both , uncheck scale and IK.

Now you can animiate the bones all in one shot , and setting a zero point is first , grab all the bones , KF slider at 0 , add KF , slide to 100 , add FK , slider to 110 , move each bone in series into position , select all the bones and add a KF , continue adding KF`s at every ten ( for brakelines ) and setting the Keys for the whole set until 200 .

Again with the whole set selected open the animation manager and tag the lot in one shot with the gear animation tag and 0 - 200 entered and your done.

clone and mirror that for the other side , http://estrie3d.com/Milviz_MirrorTool.zip you can use this to reset the pivot if you like or do it manually when needed.
 
Last edited:
Thanks for the info Chuck but I don't know if those tools are available in GMAX. I have moved on to other things at the moment but I will have to come back to this issue at some point before release.
 
I think all the stuff discussed above is present in Gmax.

As an aside, you won't see skin-bone animation in Modelconverterx because it doesn't support them, yet!


Sent with Tapatalk for iPhone
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top