• 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.

Blender2FSX Animation in P3D

B

Benny85

Messages
20
Country
germany
Hi Guys,

I am trying to get a simple cube created in Blender 2.75a exported into mdl format in P3D with a working animation in order to keep things simple, at first. The Blender2FSX Toolset was initialized without error, the model has a GUID and Friendly name. The "rudder_percent_key" animation was assigned to the cube using the FSX Animation Tool. I entered three keyframes (0 - 50 - 100) with suitable rotations around the z - axis. The animation runs correctly in Blender. The export into .mdl runs without errors and the model shows up in P3D. The animation does not, though. Moving the rudder, the cube isn't rotating at all.

Any ideas what might be wrong here? Any help for troubleshooting is appreciated.

Greets, Benny
 
What about the material? Size and scaling reset? Or is this animation compatible with P3D?
 
I'm not quite sure how I got animations working for a P3D tester but I recall exporting the aircraft to MDL and then reexporting it through MCX as a MDL (P3D V2).... I'm not sure if that influences the animations but ai got it working somehow. Other then that you might want to check if the animation was applied correctly, you can also do that by opening the MDL in MCX.
 
Is your object a static object for a scenery or an aircraft? Try first to assign your animation to "Ambient" instead of "rudder_percent_key" to see, if the animation generally works in P3D.
 
Thanks for all your input...went through all that was suggested and the animation wasn't even playing, when I tagged it as "Ambient". So I imported the .mdl into MCX and exported straight into a P3Dv2 .mdl. Then, it finally worked, also tagged as "rudder_percent_key". So very nice advice to try it this way. I also altered the export python file to use the same XtoMDL that MCX uses and now it also works directly from Blender.

The next problem I am facing with the animations: I am trying to animate two front wheels on a car for learning purposes. Investigating one of the stock vehicles with MCX I found "c_wheel" and "c_tire_still_key" to be the right animation tags for steering and moving the wheels. So there need to be two animations applied to each wheel and I don't know how to accomplish that. The first approach is to simulate the axle as own mesh, tag it with "c_tire_still_key" and make it parent to the wheels so when the axle rotates around its x-axis, so do the wheels. For steering, I then tagged the wheels with "c_wheel" and applied the relevant transformations on keyframes 0 - 50 - 100 - 150 - 200 (360 ° rotation around z). For themselves, the animations work quite nicely, but combined (driving and turning), they produce a rather erratic behavior.

Do you have any ideas, if there is a better approach to this? Thanks in advance!

Greets, Benny
 
To add the second animation, steering in this case, you add an empty to the wheels base, parent the wheel to the empty,animate the empty and tag it with the steering tag....
 
You should write your own code and create animations for that. So write steering behaviour of a car and use the output of every wheel as animation variable for the animation.
 
F747fly said:
To add the second animation, steering in this case, you add an empty to the wheels base, parent the wheel to the empty,animate the empty and tag it with the steering tag....
Click to expand...

I am gonna try that, thank you.

Dutcheeseblend said:
You should write your own code and create animations for that. So write steering behaviour of a car and use the output of every wheel as animation variable for the animation.
Click to expand...

In the end, once I am done figuring out the animation basics, I am planning to do so. I am using my C++ module to load the vehicle into P3D and do the basic placement via SimConnect. When it comes to controlling animations, what I've read so far, there is not really a (documented) way of doing this via SimConnect directly. So, the only way would be to use LVars, assigning them to the vehicle's animations and driving them with "execute_calculator_code" from my module, correct? Although VVars seem to be a more appropriate choice as they are being of local scope to an entity, I didn't find any information on how to use them correctly.

Greets, Benny
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top