Distorted Skinned Pilot

[Skip67]

Hi,

I made a post on this over at the avsim forums but no reply yet. I'm hoping someone here might be able to help.....
I created a skinned mesh pilot, with it's own biped, as normal, and it all works fine in FSX. Now, I want to be able to disappear that pilot when the engine is shut down etc. The problem is that when I attach any code to the pilot mesh and biped the whole pilot mesh appears grotesquely distorted in FSX, purely because that code is attached. (I actually attached the code to a 'dummy' box and the mesh and biped childed to that box).
I tried a different approach by removing the code from the box and instead getting it to animate or rotate the pilot out of sight (the age old trick of making things 'disappear') but much to my surprise the pilot mesh still appears very distorted. Has anybody experienced this before and found a solution ? Basically I'm looking for a way to hide a skinned mesh object.

Many Thanks.

Terry

 

[lionheart]

Hey Skip,

I believe this might answer your question on the issue;

http://www.fsdeveloper.com/forum/showthread.php?t=21846

Here is the problem: if you are using skinned mesh animations for animating your pilot you cannot use visibility code! For some reason ACES decided that such an
attempt will screw up your mesh.

Cheers, Vitus

I wonder if this would still happen if you linked the pilot to a part, and then linked that part to the 'hide' component? Then the pilot would not be directly linked to a visibility tag. It would be part of an assembly, immediately bypassing the viz issue.

 

[Heretic]

I wonder if this would still happen if you linked the pilot to a part, and then linked that part to the 'hide' component? Then the pilot would not be directly linked to a visibility tag. It would be part of an assembly, immediately bypassing the viz issue.

Doesn't work. Vitus tried it with a pitot cover made from skinned mesh and it remained visible all the time while the parent part appeared/disappeared correctly.

Maybe tagging the bones themselves would work?
Remember, the mesh itself is of totally second nature in a skinned mesh/bones assembly.

 

[n4gix]

Unfortunately, <Visibility> does not work on skin-boned mesh. The only work-around I've found is to animate the bones to be collapsed to a very tiny part at frame zero, and blown-up to full size at frame 1...

...then make certain that any animation runs only from frame 1 to frame XXX, only going to zero whenever I want the object to be invisible.

For example, I had hoped that this would cause the 3d light polgons for my landing/taxi lights to be invisible during the daytime:

    <Visibility>
      <Parameter>
        <Code>
          (E:Time of Day,enum) 1 !=
        </Code>
      </Parameter>
    </Visibility>

Unfortunately, it doesn't work, which is why during low visibility conditions the darn things show up during the daytime! Quite ugly they are too!

I've since moved the condition to the actual "animation code" for the distance node, so that the rectangles will be collapsed (frame 0) during the daytime:

        <Code>
          (E:Time of Day,enum) 1 != (A:PLANE ALT ABOVE GROUND, feet) 3.5 - 0.66 * 90 (A:PLANE PITCH DEGREES, degrees) - 0.01111 * * * 1000 min
        </Code>

 

[Skip67]

OK all, many thanks for your replies and clearing this up for me.
Thanks Fr. Bill.

Terry