FSDS or GMAX

[Brandon]

Hello folks,
I have been going over the GMAX tutorials for a while and I feel like I'm not getting anywhere... I can only create simple objects so far and even those seem quite complicated to put together.
Is FSDS any easier? I know that it doesn't have as much capability, but I'm willing to sacrifice a little capability for an easier to use scenery design program... I'm wanting something like EOD with animation features and the textures displayed on the project...

Thanks in advance for the help,

Brandon

 

[Gorchi]

Hi Brandon!
GMAX is really advanced software for designing objects with support of animations and so on. But it is difficult to learn basics and modelling concept in which FSDS is still much easier. I still produce my objects in FSDS and I find it easy to use but lacking in animations field. Some simple animations can be easiliy done, more complex, for example translation and rotation are difficult to impossible to do. Also there is one catch behind though. GMAX is officially supported by MS, so the code produced with it is supported by MS and it works. Once I watched a video from Discovery web, where they showed how they actually designed aircraft for FS2004.
FSDS although easier to use (btw, You can use demo version for producing objects) is still dependant on SCASM which I think does not work 100% correctly on fields of (complex) animations with its special instructions. Otherwise it works great, I can easily produce quite complex objects and they are FS2002 and 2004 frame rate friendly.

Best regards,

 

[arno]

Hi Brandon,

FSDS is probably a bit easier to learn, but it still has a learning curve like any program. And now that you know GMax a bit, you might notice that FSDS requires a slightly different way of thinking again.

Personally I prefer GMax, because once you know how to work with the program, you will certainly enjoy all the abilities it has to model your objects.

EDIT: Been typing too long, Goran already posted a detailed reply .

 

[Shakakoz]

After being a common lurker, I've decided to actually participate in the forum.

I'm a die-hard FSDS user, and I've been using it for at least 4 years. Having said that, I've decided to cross over to the "dark side" and use GMAX. I think that the greatest opposition to learning GMAX came from FSDS users like me. My advice to anyone who hasn't learned either of these programs is to jump right into GMAX. There are quite a few good tutorials out there, and there are planty of people willing to help us along.

The reason I crossed over to GMAX was because I was concerned about future FS compatibility with SCASM - FSDS uses SCASM as a compiler. As long as MS keeps supporting GMAX/BGLComp, then it should be pretty easy to recompile my scenery even if there are small changes between versions, as we saw between FS2002 and FS2004.

- Martin

 

[Moonlight Sonata]

GMAX is easy if you ignore most of the features....

I started by placing simple 3d blocks then learnt how to extrude line polygons to make complex shapes.

for texturing, I learn to texture using tiling (UVW mapping - box) or mapping (unwrap UVW) using multi-materials - nothing else.

I've now moved onto deforming modifiers to make even more complex shapes and adding/subtracting one shape from another.

as previously mentioned, tutorials available on the web make learning the basics easy.

 

[Brandon]

Thanks for the input guys. Guess I'll keep working with GMAX, maybe someday I'll figure it out..

Brandon

 

[bob5568]

Brandon, my experience with learning GMAX was that for a bit I was feeling lost just doing tutorials without understanding why, and finally...it clicked.

I didn't even see it coming. Just one day it all made sense. After enough tutorials I'd simply committed enough jargon to memory and had enough practice with the basics that I realized it made sense.

Since then I've doubled my understanding of the program, but then that's been a few years of working it since that day of "aha".

You may be close to that point where it clicks! As soon as that happens it becomes a lot of fun.

Bob Bernstein

 

[Joe W]

"GMAX is officially supported by MS, so the code produced with it is supported by MS and it works."

GMax is not supported by Microsoft. I can't, for some reason, install GMax on my computer. I wrote Mocrosoft about my problem and they said that it's not their program and they do not support it.
I never did get it to install.
Joe W.

 

[arno]

The tool GMax itself is not supported by MS, it is made by Discreet. But the gamepack is officially supported by MS and that means the scenery you can create with it is usually most up to date for the current version of FS. None of the other 3D object tools has been updated to the Fs2004 format yet.

 

[Gorchi]

Hi!
Sorry for not completely accurate statement about gmax. As stated by Arno, gmax is made by discreet (btw, does anybody know if discreet was long time ago a part of Autodesk?). Interface part, for porting models into Flight Simulator is made by Microsoft and if You look MS Flight Simulator's homepage, You can notice 2 videos from Discovery channel, that show how MS team worked on Piper J3 cub in gmax...

Sorry again for confusion and best regards,

 

[Sean_E]

Yes Discreet is a child of Autodesk.
Because Autodesk primarily deals with the AutoCAD programs and they started to expand into the 3D realm, they created Discreet.

I started learning 3D design on AutoCAD 11 when it was still in its infancy.

Sean E.