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Blender Flight Stick "Bellows": Bone animation

mariopilot

mariopilot

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141
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peru
Hello All,

So I decided to try and animate a stick "bellow" with bones, so that the bottom stays put while the rest deforms in X-Y direction. The setup:
- 2 bones: one holds the bottom in place, the other acts on the rest (with a gradient weight so that the top moves with the stick, and the bottom gradually stays put.
- Each of these matches in name with a proper vertex group in the bellow mesh.
- these two meet at their root, located at the root of the "bellow". the animation bone points upwards as representing the shaft.
- Animation bone is a child of the fixed one.
- The animation contains 3x NLA track, lever stick_fore_aft and lever_stick_l_r (these are custom ModelBehviours, but they do exactly what the old FS-X parts did). Third one is "Default_State" (empty track). not sure if needed for aircraft.
- Both the mesh and its armature are located under an "empty". this is the distortion avoidance trick.
- Model is exported with Blender2MSFS2 (https://github.com/flybywiresim/msfs2blender2msfs).

This works, but with a "hack":
- In Blender, animations start where they should, but end 2x farther than where they end up in FS.
- When exporting, make sure to select "Apply modifiers " under mesh settings for the exporter. Failure to do so yields to distortion ...
- In FS, if the above is not done, the animation will only deflect 50% of the way
- NOTE: disabling either the L/R or fore/aft channel causes the other animation to match with what is in Blender...
- NOTE 2: playing with the ModelBehavior does not help to avoid this hack (2x anim length and/or 2x the variable... the same)
- NOTE 3: if in Blender you simply squish the keyframes from 0-100 to 0-50, the animation will only reach 25...

I can live with the "2x deflection" hack, but wonder if I am doing something wrong!
 
I can't help. I've tried getting bones to animate with two inputs sources (ie stick fore-aft and left-right) and just gave up. I can get a single source to work (an antenna bending in the wind for example) but with a joystick I couldn't figure it out.

I'm just convinced (unless someone can point out otherwise) that the implementation of bones in MSFS is simply different to how Blender does it so the two will never appear the same.
 
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