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MSFS20 Fix for windsock blowing the wrong way

FlyingsCool said:
That's correct. It only shows up after you've built the project and it's part of the scenery. The funny thing is what I mentioned, it somehow sees the building in game and won't nestle partially inside it, but when you enter dev mode, it goes to the correct altitude. I tried it a couple of times with a couple altitudes and the result was the same, correct altitude once you enter dev mode, on top of the building in game.
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I just did a quick test: The stock windsock is definitively ignoring both size parameters (pole hight and sock length) for me. I did not test the lit parameter though.

Steffsim said:
I tried it many hours in blender (with bones), but unfortunately without success. In principle it works (rotation to winddirection and animation depending on windspeed), but unfortunately it always distorts the windsock.
I think it's a problem of blender or blender2msfs. Hope you get it, I gave up at the moment.
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Thanks for the information! I guess I'll give it a shot, but I will not have too high expectations. I'll keep you informed about the progress!
 
SinusJayCee said:
I'm planning to do some experiments with Blender's cloth simulation
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Is Cloth supported in the MFS? I had played around with the Cloth modifier in 3ds Max and there are great things you can do with it. That would be really good if cloth is supported in the MFS.
 
I don't know yet. If it is not explicitly supported, my hope is that one can convert the animation into a keyframe animation and export it MSFS. For my understanding, at least in Blender, cloth simulation is in the end nothing else than moving vertices around. So once the movement has been "simulated" once in Blender, one should in theory be able to bring just that movement to the sim.
 
SinusJayCee said:
I just did a quick test: The stock windsock is definitively ignoring both size parameters (pole hight and sock length) for me. I did not test the lit parameter though.


Thanks for the information! I guess I'll give it a shot, but I will not have too high expectations. I'll keep you informed about the progress!
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Just wanted to ask for help in this regard, but then I guess the stock windsock is broken. Also wanted to change its height. Btw it also ignores the tick box to being lit: it does not light up at night. Too many bugs in the SDK still, not so fun to develop anything yet...
 
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All the MSFS windsock I have seen to date, seem to change direction almost INSTANTLY !!
Bones 1 - 5 seem to animate smoothy, but bone 0, the rotation seems to just JUMP from one direction to another instantly

So when amimating the windsock, how does one control , in effect the acceleration and deceleration and speed of the rotational movement. ?
What controls, if any are available

Yes, I know nothing about MSFS object animation !!!
 
Unfortunately I had no time to work on the windsock so far. But I just noticed that the recent dev update is stating that a windsock sample has been added to the SDK. Since this usually means that all source files are included, this will properly solve our problem already. I'll have a look at it tonight.

Geoff_D said:
All the MSFS windsock I have seen to date, seem to change direction almost INSTANTLY !!
Bones 1 - 5 seem to animate smoothy, but bone 0, the rotation seems to just JUMP from one direction to another instantly

So when amimating the windsock, how does one control , in effect the acceleration and deceleration and speed of the rotational movement. ?
What controls, if any are available
Click to expand...
This is indeed caused by the way the direction is controlled in the SDK. You basically say "set the rotation of the sock to the same direction as the wind", i.e., there is no transition animation. I'm not an expert in this field either, but with my current knowledge I cannot think about a convenient way to realize a smooth transition.
 
Its a shame, because the other Bones move the sock in an animated vertical direction, seem to animate quite nicely, without too much jerkiness.
Not that you can easily see the windsock, unless you are virtually on top of them, so maybe it does not matter.
 
The difference between the bones animation and the turning animation is that the former is created in the 3D program and then simply played in a loop in the sim. In contrast, for the turning animation, the sim just "jumps" to a certain position in order to match the sock direction with the wind direction.
 
Steffsim said:
I tried it many hours in blender (with bones), but unfortunately without success. In principle it works (rotation to winddirection and animation depending on windspeed), but unfortunately it always distorts the windsock.
I think it's a problem of blender or blender2msfs. Hope you get it, I gave up at the moment.
Click to expand...
I successfully exported a Blender bones animation (for a flag) to MSFS: https://www.fsdeveloper.com/forum/t...-the-wind-direction.449666/page-2#post-862447

I had large distortions of the mesh in the first place as well. It turned out that you need to apply scale and rotation to your objects before exporting the model. After that, the animation looked exactly as in Blender.
 
I have tried to do an animation in Blender and get it into MSFS, but can't get my head around how it should be done. I have no previous experience in animating. The new SDK 0.7 has a windsock sample, but unfortunately the model still has this standard pole included. I only have Blender, so I can't oopen the included .max file.

Is there anybody here that has 3dmax who could just simply remove the pole for me so that I could continue with the sample and then attach that sock to various types of poles? I would be very grateful for that help (and of course give credit in my freeware airport readme files).
 
Now we realised that the gLTF file can be read directly into Blender, including animations. The pole is a separate object so it can easily be removed. But when I export the file again all animations are gone, so I am doing something wrong....
 
I didn't try that, but since the gLTF file is a simple text file, you can open it with a text editor and it should be possible to delete the pole object from it.

If you can wait roughly another week, my windsock should be ready. Unfortunately, I had no time to continue with this topic so far :(
 
Nope, don't get it...

Should Blender2MSFS be able to export bone animations? What is the trick to do that?
 
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Yes, Blender2MSFS can export bone animations. Give me a few minutes, I'll have a look at the SDK example and how it looks like in Blender. Maybe I can identify the issue.
 
I identified the problem: The waving animations are named "Knots_00", "Knots_05", ... in the XML file. But when you import the model into Blender, they are named "Knots_00_Windsock_SPINE0" etc. The same holds true for the orientation animation, which also got an extra "_Windsock_SPINE0" at the end.

Another issue is that the MSFS material properties are not imported at all.

I'll try to fix the Blender file, give me another few minutes (plus probably half an hour for verifying the result in the sim ;) ).
 
Unfortunately, it is more complicated than expected. I have the animations in the sim. They change correctly with the wind speed and the sock turns with the wind direction. But there is a transformation issue, which distorts the windsock.

I need some more time to fix this, which I don't have right now.

I attached you what I have so far. Maybe you or someone else are able to solve the issue. Otherwise, I'll continue with this next week.
 

Attachments

  • Windsock.zip
    2 MB · Views: 246
Thanks for your effort, I will have a look at it. Meanwhile, I found another quick-and-dirty fix: The pole is the Body1 item in the gtlf. I changed the size of that part from 1,1,1 to 0.001, 0.001, 0.001 to make the pole almost invisibly small. Works quite well. The sock can be resized nicely in DevMode, but when loaded back into MSFS it has it's original size...
 
Thanks for the information! I theory, it should also be possible to remove the Body1 item from the gtlf file.

The scaling problem may apply to all SimObjects. In this case, you would need to apply the scale in Blender and cannot scale it afterwards. Another option would be to adjust the scale in the gltf file. You would probably need to scale SPINE1, Body2, and Body3 to get it working.
 
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