MSFS Flag waving in the wind direction

[SinusJayCee]

I observed the issue with the scaling of SimObjects as well, so it seems to be a general thing.

Regarding making a flag in Blender: To the best of my knowledge, you cannot use cloth simulation and need to use bone animations instead. @RomanDesign did experiments on this without success (see first two pages in this discussion). However, what you can do is to use cloth simulation to give the flag sheet a more realistic look:

MSFS - Flag waving in the wind direction

I built my flag with some wind and gravity forces in 3ds max and finaly animated the flag with bones. i think its a good way to have a animated and good looking flag without using tons of bones. Even better than no animation :)

www.fsdeveloper.com

 

[614NLV]

Hi thanks for the reply
do you know if it's a msfsToolsKit limit?
and do you know if with 3dsMax I can successfully use the cloth simulation?

 

[SinusJayCee]

I've no experience with 3ds Max. But since Asobo is using bone animations for their windsock as well, I would assume that this is a MSFS limitation. (But at least we have bone animations, which is not the case in X-Plane as far as I know.)

 

[RomanDesign]

Yes, I can confirm - no cloth simulation or any way of transferring it to bone simulation that I could find. So I had to manually do bone animation, and use the second animation for the wind, as I was advised in this topic. It works quite well. Not as natural-looking as cloth simulation, but acceptable. Brings a lot of live feeling to the airport.

 

[Claviateur]

Yes, I can confirm - no cloth simulation or any way of transferring it to bone simulation that I could find. So I had to manually do bone animation, and use the second animation for the wind, as I was advised in this topic. It works quite well. Not as natural-looking as cloth simulation, but acceptable. Brings a lot of live feeling to the airport.

Looks great. I wish I was good at creating Bone Animated 3D

 

[614NLV]

that's a real shame, because cloth simulation animation is so much better.
so far in my development airport I had temporarily put yours canadian, just changing the texture.
But of course I wanted to make my own, so I studied the physics of blender, which I did not know.
and when I finished, the result was great.
But in the sim only the rotation at the wind worked, the flag turned well ... but flat.
Too bad, now I will have to learn the bones with blender as well knowing that I will never reach the same result that I got with the cloth simulation.
anyway thanks Roman for the answer and congratulations for the work with the parallax, now I don't need it but surely later yes and I will study you very carefully

 

[RomanDesign]

that's a real shame, because cloth simulation animation is so much better.

I went through the same steps as you. I couldn't even find a way to capture the sloth simulation frame by frame and put it into the animation. The only feasible way was to tediously make a manual bone animation.

 

[Mikea.at]

There is this Tutorial Cloth to Bones with constrains. i could not tried it until now so i dont know if it still works like this in blender 2.9+

 

[RomanDesign]

There is this Tutorial Cloth to Bones with constrains. i could not tried it until now so i dont know if it still works like this in blender 2.9+

Nice! I'll have to try that sometime...

 

[JimmyB]

Hey guys, I got a bone flag animation linking to a cloth animation but struggled to get it to export correctly. So I went back to basics and created a basic plane with some bones, I can get it exporting but it plays really weirdly warped in MSFS, like a stretched bananna. Am I missing anything here?

(1) create bone animation

(2) set up keyframes (on bone rotation)

(3) bake animation on the flag mesh: select flag object -> Animation->Bake action

(4) push it down (I need to select the bones or the flag mesh?)

(5) rename the mesh and the NLATrack to be the same

(5) export (untick apply modifiers)

(6) add the animation line in the .xml with guid.

 

[RomanDesign]

I had a really weird deformed flag, rotated in the wrong axis etc. - the solution was to Ctrl+A - Apply All. You have to apply all scale etc. to all of the objects, then animate them, then export. This solved it for me. Generally, MSFS doesn't like objects without applied size/scale and can do all kinds of weird things to them. So it's always a good idea to apply all before exporting any object.

 

[JimmyB]

I had a really weird deformed flag, rotated in the wrong axis etc. - the solution was to Ctrl+A - Apply All. You have to apply all scale etc. to all of the objects, then animate them, then export. This solved it for me. Generally, MSFS doesn't like objects without applied size/scale and can do all kinds of weird things to them. So it's always a good idea to apply all before exporting any object.

Ah ha! I thought I did that but can see from the screen shot I hadnt. Thanks! I'll give it a shot. Thank you!!!

 

[clements]

@JimmyB, I just replied to your post on reddit. With that in mind, looking more closely at your screenshot, your NlaTrack is part of your flag mesh. Try making it part of the armature. You are animating the bones which will move the mesh.

 

[JimmyB]

@JimmyB, I just replied to your post on reddit. With that in mind, looking more closely at your screenshot, your NlaTrack is part of your flag mesh. Try making it part of the armature. You are animating the bones which will move the mesh.

Thanks for taking a look, your reply on reddit was most useful. I just wrapped up work for the day so knocked together another flag based on your advise. Currently trying to test it as quietly as possible before the kids burst in to my office. 😁

 

[JimmyB]

I think I am nearly there, changing the locations of the mesh to zero helped the warping issue, one thing left I cant figure out now is that the animation only bends the flag one way but it plays fine in blender. Here's a recording which shows the config file and the problem; is there anything obvious I am doing wrong? This is the last step to finish my Principality of Sealand model

Thanks!

 

[szcsongor]

Yes, I can confirm - no cloth simulation or any way of transferring it to bone simulation that I could find. So I had to manually do bone animation, and use the second animation for the wind, as I was advised in this topic. It works quite well. Not as natural-looking as cloth simulation, but acceptable. Brings a lot of live feeling to the airport.

Looks good indeed. Shame that there is no template for such animated objects in the SDK yet and we have to figure out some far-from-perfect solutions.
Are you maybe willing to share your flag with illiterate, layman scenery builders like me?

 

[Wookie042]

For you guys that have figured out how to make an animated flag or windsock:
Would it be possible to make a video tutorial of your work flow and what you did from start to finish?
I really want to make some windsocks, but piecing together all the bits and pieces of information around is so tedious and I'm unable to follow, which makes it impossible for me and my limited knowledge to even start with the project.
The modelling part of an actual flag/windsock is not the big problem, but it would help me a ton (and probably a lot more people) if anybody could make a video tutorial showing all the stuff that needs to be done.
It doesn't need to be a perfect video, just screencapturing and explaining what you do.
Would anybody willing to do that?

 

[Mikea.at]

finaly i found the solution how to bake a cloth simulation to the bones and export that to msfs.
it was the approach from post #88 but it does not have to be that complicated you can do it with just one plane.
it needs more tweaking to look even better but it is the right direction

with some more subdivisions and adjusting of the weightpainting it is even better

next step will be bake different wind speeds to get different animations based on the msfs wind and the rotation of the whole flag.

 

[JimmyB]

finaly i found the solution how to bake a cloth simulation to the bones and export that to msfs.
it was the approach from post #88 but it does not have to be that complicated you can do it with just one plane.
it needs more tweaking to look even better but it is the right direction

with some more subdivisions and adjusting of the weightpainting it is even better

next step will be bake different wind speeds to get different animations based on the msfs wind and the rotation of the whole flag.

Wow this is looks great. Would you be able to share the steps you took through to exporting it, or maybe even a blender file? 🙏

 

[Mikea.at]

yes this is possible, but i have to do another with a better cloth animation this is just a basic shorty to check if it is working