Cars and Trucks: some ideas

[AFTRS]

Cars and Trucks: some ideas

Airports consist of a hugh number of items. Some of them might be cars and trucks.
I am developing for the times of the good old DC-3 area. So we are talking about the 50ths and 60ths, may be early 70ths.

Not that easy in concerns with the required forms and lines of those items.

In the past I started an airport where a parking area needed to be filled up with passenger cars.

The very beginning of the theme started for the cars as required by that:

Some 5 objects seemed to be very “furious”.
This was not very satisfying. So, more cars where needed. On the airport some trucks also.

How to do that.
First of all:
1. Once taken any item into consideration, have a look on the technical descriptions.
You might find that a number of cars have similar lines and dimensions, or that you can develop out of the same shape very different items.
For example: Peugeot 404 isn’t that far away from Wolseley, Morris, or Fiat.
So implement a standard car body that you can reuse all the time. The differences in between the types will be small changes to the vertex and of course texturing.

2. Keep in mind that there should be a wide range of variations of the same item.
For example a limousine, a pick up, a station wagon. Things like that.
I did that for example of a VW T1 Bus.

The same with the yellow Post-VW or the variations of the Henschel truck.
Some minor changes with additional results.

3. Additional polygons might be worth of consideration:
I added to the standard car body some additional polygons so that the “body form” represents the mayor lines. Makes it much more easy to texture and gives better results. The standard body consists of only 67 polygons.
Some “Extra”-Polygons might make sense:

The Magirus has only 4 additional polygons compared to the Mercedes.
Worthwhile, isn’t it?

4. Wheels and wheel housing

Seems to be easy just to put the wheels a little bit outside the left or right line of the car body. In the mean time I do not like that any more at all. Looks ok from some view points. The character of a truck / car might get lost. In addition it might be necessary to build wheel housing. See VW T1 or any of the Peugeot cars. In addition the Mercedes fire truck with the wheels imbedded looks from that special point of view much better than the commercial one:

That was a long post. I could only just address some of the mayor points.
Do you think it would be worth while to discuss that kind of topics?

 

[arno]

Hi Christian,

Thanks for sharing your findings with us. Very interesting thread and I must say your models look beautiful as well .

 

[Deleted member 1281]

Very very nice indeed, and just about the period I am interested in. I do like the shadows even though I understand they are expensive frameratewise.

On that note, personally, what I would like to see are a few higher-detail models (with transparent windows etc.) at perhaps 4+ times the poly count, for close up activity - jeeps, staff cars, fuel trucks, crew buses, things that get close to the aircraft etc. - in addition to the static items that populate the periphery. Also some that move about on access roads. In FS9 this was sometimes done by creating an AI duplicate airfield, but that came with several drawbacks. You could also do it via LAGO, which no longer exists unfortunately and apparently has taken its trade secret with them. FSRecorder seems a better option now, but it really needs plausible models, turning and inclining wheels etc.

 

[AFTRS]

Thanks for the feedback

Some of my static objects do have animation (done with GMAX) and some do have transparent windows with overlayed textures.

On the above airport the oilpumps are all moving. Still didn´t manage to just copy and then restart animation at a diffent frame for the same complete animation cyle.
Means: One oilpump starts at 15 degrees, the next one at 37 degrees, all must run the 360 degree cycle of the mayor axle. It is moving parts in four different directions at the same time:

(The oilpumps aren´t ready jet, but they do work properly)

Just implemented for the imagination of differently moving oilpumps with different start points two modells. This insures that they all seem to move at different angles. Just a question of placement.
But, I had to do the animation twice.

Moving vehicles and things like that: Works with GMax, not such a hugh load.
I let my Elgin Pelican doing a lot of apron sweeping

Therefor I just export the "animated" static model. Means, it just follows some lines in GMAX that would represent the apron. As simple it is, it needs some tries to get it working in detail to follow the correct lines.
Works in both, FS9 and FSX.

I didn´t yet port all of objects that have animation issued by special events from FS9 to FSX. Used CAT in FS9. May be there will be some challenge.