Not sure if FSX or FSXA

[=rk=]

Not really sure where you come away with the notion about a "FSX parent requirement." You have been told categorically in several posts that there is no requirement for a parent

An ambient animation of a waving flag can be simply that and it does not need to be tagged or parented to the pole, the same holds true with a control surface, unless it is part of a chain, like a Fowler flap, it will rotate on it's axes in place in accordance with simulator variables.

I know this for a FACT. I have created ambient animations of flag poles and windmills and I have created steerable, flyable user aircraft. The only time you need to create a parent is to link two animations together.

The parent aligned same as the animated object is not an FSX requirement, but I don't know if it's an FSDS/FSDSxtweak requirement. It's certainly not one I know of from other modelling programs.

Zoren did not tell us the animation needs a parent, he told us the animation needs zero rotation and an easy way to accomplish this is through using a duplicated part as a parent.
So, are you selling this FS2004 specific AI plane that has 45 parts in the animated exhaust?

Also, this information from Zoren jibes with my attempts at a FS2004 conversion; I'd deduced that all animations descend from a common parent (in this particular model) and when I add my animation, it is not consistent with that pattern. So I isolated the wing component, imported to FSDS, named it, parented the flap assemblies to it and voila, the model compiled with the other animations intact, unlike the way they'd been before. Other issues, probably related to the zero rotation situation prevented me calling the operation a complete success, but it was definite progress.

 

[Weescotty]

Selling, nope will be freeware as is anything I do.

MAIW Desert Falcons
MAIW Chile Block 50

Parent...found this hour or so ago off the Abacus website FSDS FAQ's - http://www.abacuspub.com/product-support#fsds

Question: My animations are not working in FSX. Do you have any suggestions?
Answer: All animated parts must have a parent part. To be more specific, all animated parts must have a parent part that has the same axis as the part being animated.

Then again wouldn't be the first time Abacus was wrong.


Going to have one more crack at it tonight, see what happens.
At worst I could just use MCX to convert each model individually.
Must be an easier way of tagging the RBF flags and covers than going through the heirachy editor?

 

[Zoren]

It has been awhile since I played with FSDS and couldn't remember where I read that (other than the book I mentioned...). I did test it on my plane I wanted in FSX by removing the parent part. In FSDS it looks good and animates fine but when in MCX or FSX it looks like this:

I don't believe this parent issue is an FSX issue as I have no parent parts in the model in Blender and it works fine. Must be something they did when they updated FSDS to work/compile FSX models.

 

[hairyspin]

Thanks Zoren, that’s helpful.

 

[Weescotty]

Well another perplexing find.
I duplicated one of the flaps, made it the parent of the actual part.
Set it as heirachical.
Redid the animations on the actual flap.
Result - No difference!!!!

 

[Weescotty]

Spoke too soon.
If I renamed the other flap from flap.1 to flap.right after compiling the flap with the parent poly was fine.
So then tried just renaming the other two, no change, anims all over the place.
Will keep testing.

[edit]
Done the same with the right wing slat and flap
Created parent poly made it hierarchical
Linked the original parts back
Redid the animation
Recompiled
They look good.

Still leaves what to do about the exhaust and gear. They are all very complex animations

 

[=rk=]

So, a rousing success at this point, all animations intact and fully animated flaps, the left one droops toward the wingtip and it's just going to stay that way.

Some issues I encountered: I was not able to follow Zoren's procedure exactly, because I do not create geometry in FSDS, therefore I did not exactly erase the parent part, although I did mark it as hierarchical node (no geometry). The first attempt showed the parent wing rendered with the model wing, also only one animation worked. I imported the .fsc to MCX and deleted the ModelPart that was the wing. I then renamed all the animations that had a ".1" appended to them. So l_flap_percent_key.1 and r_flap_percent_key.1 are automatically applied by FSDS, but are not accepted animation tags in P3Dv4. Finally an offset had been applied to the flaps, the option to reset part rotation had been greyed out in the FSDS menu. Through trial and error I adjusted the Y offset to 1.25 and the Z offset to -1.95 in the MCX Merge Objects window and after that the flaps matched almost perfectly at the wing root.
Now it's on to create a blurred prop model!

 

[Weescotty]

Glad your having success Rick,
I have decided to forego changing the FSDS model from FS2004 to FSX standards.
Instead I am going to use modelconverterx to change them. Although overall it will take more time, but at least it is less frustrating.
If I rename all the tick18 animations and compile for FS2004 when I open in MCX at least they show up in the animation manager so I can assign FSX animations to them.
Longest part is stepping through the heirarchy manager to assign the visibility code. But I think I can get a few volunteers at MAIW to help with that part.

Just have to figure out a few things regarding lights.
1) Do I delete the LIGHT NAV and LIGHT TAXI parts (also the two materials) then re-add them as attached effects?
2) I believe you only need to do it on the top LOD?

 

[Heretic]

You don't need to do any preprocessing on the model if you want to convert it with ModelConverter. Once you have all of the animations tagged, you can simply export the model and go on from there.
You'll have to recover the visibility-controlled parts in some way since MCX does not import visbility tags from FS9 models (yet). Either try to recover them with the import options (the box that pops up when you import the model) to display them, then isolate them in the hierarchy editor, export it as a FSX model and merge it into with the main model (don't forget to assign the visibility tag in the hierarchy editor). Or export each visibility tagged part from FSDS in FSX format and merge it into the main model in MCX, then assign the visibility tag.

To get the basics of model conversion down, read the wiki article I've written on the subject eons ago.
http://www.fsdeveloper.com/wiki/index.php?title=Converting_AI_aircraft_to_FSX_with_Model_Converter_X

 

[=rk=]

Just have to figure out a few things regarding lights.
1) Do I delete the LIGHT NAV and LIGHT TAXI parts (also the two materials) then re-add them as attached effects?
2) I believe you only need to do it on the top LOD?

Thank you. Fsx supports aircraft.cfg attached effects and model attached effects, ultimately the choice is yours about the lights, I'd say leave well enough alone and all attached effects affect all LOD's, so you'd need make any changes only once.

 

[Weescotty]

Thanks guys...

Heretic - Thats is the problem, if I leave the FS2004 parts as
tick18.othername
They don't show up in the animation editor to assign other animations to them.
The only way I found was to rename them as another part name not defined in MakeMDL.parts file.
When compiling FSDS assigns username8 to them.
They then show up in the animation editor so I can assign an animation to them.
Quite possible I am missing something.

Chocks, flags, caps, covers etc etc - all either directly or through another part link back to the main poly 'Lights_Off' in the FS2004 model.
Is there any way to keep the heirarchy to 'Lights Off' that way I only need to re-tag that one poly?
Or is that all dropped because its a visibility poly?

Slightly different question.....
XML for 60 keyframes repeating every 10 seconds or so, without using G: or L: vars.
(A:LOCAL TIME,seconds) 10 * 60 %
Doesn't quite work.
Can't use Ambient because the pilots head uses Ambient with 500 frames, and I believe Ambient has to use the same number of frames for seperate parts?

Cheers

 

[Heretic]

Heretic - Thats is the problem, if I leave the FS2004 parts as
tick18.othername
They don't show up in the animation editor to assign other animations to them.
The only way I found was to rename them as another part name not defined in MakeMDL.parts file.
When compiling FSDS assigns username8 to them.
They then show up in the animation editor so I can assign an animation to them.
Quite possible I am missing something.

This could have been discussed before, but why do you want tick18 animations on an AI aircraft in the first place?

Chocks, flags, caps, covers etc etc - all either directly or through another part link back to the main poly 'Lights_Off' in the FS2004 model.
Is there any way to keep the heirarchy to 'Lights Off' that way I only need to re-tag that one poly?
Or is that all dropped because its a visibility poly?

Hierarchy works exactly the same for FSX models.
All you need is an XML tag for the Lights_Off poly that is driven by whatever light is supposed to switch the chcocks, etc. off. (Beacon light I figure.)

Slightly different question.....
XML for 60 keyframes repeating every 10 seconds or so, without using G: or L: vars.
(A:LOCAL TIME,seconds) 10 * 60 %
Doesn't quite work.

There's no A: var for local time. You're looking for E:Local Time

See here: https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc526981.aspx#EnvironmentData

Can't use Ambient because the pilots head uses Ambient with 500 frames, and I believe Ambient has to use the same number of frames for seperate parts?

The modeldef.xml entry for Ambient does not contain a fixed number of keyframes, so I assume that anything goes?

 

[Weescotty]

Yup (E:LOCAL TIME,seconds) 10 * 60 % fat fingers, my bad.
Doesn't quite work right.
I expected it to get to 7 and return 10 from the - 70 60 % - but thats doesn't seem to be happening.
The animation runs then stops for what would be 7 seconds to 60 seconds.

Ambient - yeah I think you can go to just over 1000 frames, but it seems all the parts must have the same number of frames.

Easy fix would be to reduce the pilots head to 480 keyframes and use
(E:LOCAL TIME,seconds)
and use Ambient for the flags I guess?

Will retry the heirarchy again and attach the visible/invisible code to the parent poly again.

 

[Heretic]

I've never really used ambient tags, so I don't know how to implement them best. Here's some threads Google spat out:
https://www.avsim.com/forums/topic/361023-animation-using-ambient-tag/
https://www.fsdeveloper.com/forum/threads/ambient-animation-at-regular-intervals.434739/

Seems to be that keyframes + Ambient tag is all it takes.

 

[Weescotty]

Wish I could find the thread again were it mentions about number of keyframes.
Paraphrasing -
If you have a wheel and a radar dish.
Use Ambient for both.
Wheel @ 0-100
Radar @ 0-200

The wheel will rotate 1 revolution
The radar will rotate 1/2 revolution
Wheel stops
Radar does 101-200
then they both start at 0 again and repeat.

[edit] LOL its in the Avsim thread you linked to.....
"Make sure the number of keyframes is the same as your first "ambient" part though as this is set be the first use of "ambient"."

So will use Ambient for the flags, time based and reduce frames to 480 for the pilot head.

 

[Weescotty]

Well thanks for all your help guys.

The MAIW F-16 is on its way to being 100% FSX native.
Decided against modelconverterx, and going for the 100% native FSDS project.
Makes it easier in the long run, just add different weapons loadouts and recompile, no spending hours converting each FS9 model in modelconverterx.
Luckily most items are copy and paste down the LOD's.

In fact it looks as though the best work flow is FSX first, as its easier to convert 'back' to FS9, than the other way around.
Will remember that for future projects!

Got all the stuff together for FSX effect attachpoints in FSDS.
Two quickies on that -
For the taxi and landing lights - simple poly with Y-axis pointing in direction of the beam?
Nav lights etc - what to use and what axis orientation?

About ready to test the top LOD (400) model, just have the main gear to re animate.

 

[Heretic]

Only directional (landing, taxi, etc.) lights require a specific orientation.

See here:
https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc526974.aspx#AddingLights

 

[Paul Domingue]

Ran into two issues ....
1) I have 3 XtoMdl files, one in each of the 3 folders -
3DSM7
3DSM9
FSX_GmaxGamePack

The first and third work, the middle one (3DSM9) always craps out not long after starting the compile process. Which one should I use, I have the full version of FSX with FSXA included.

Going back to your original question, for some reason Microsoft forgot to digitally sign the XtoMDL file in the (3DSM9) folder of the original FSX SDK. That is why it fails. The other copies of XtoMDL are identical and were signed. You can copy one of them to the (3DSM9) folder and it will compile properly.