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FS2004 Just another ho-hum day with Gmax.

H

Here for the Beer

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unitedkingdom
Not writing about a problem, just airing a kind of bloggish account of the past two days' work.

A while back I was fretting about a canopy transparency that was hiding the flaps on my AI aircraft, and discovered that grouping some completely different parts of my project made the masking problem disappear.

Well, as I suspected it would, the masking problem reappeared for some equally obscure reason and I set about trying to make a fix that would stick. This is where the fun started. I read about zbias being used for texture names and figured I would try it with part names.

So I called l_flap "zbias_01_l_flap" instead. I lost the free animation (oooh thanks, I'll have two) but the problem vanished. I then realised the problem was also visible on the fuselage beneath the canopy (I could see forward into the "engine bay") so I started fiddling with zbias on the fuselage. Fixed that problem but then the crew never appeared because part of the canopy is attached to the fuselage and was now taking priority over my disappearing-and-animating crew. Spent a night pondering a workaround that didn't mean compromising my animations etc and restarted work this morning. A few more experiments and nothing was changing for the better.

So, I stripped back the project, reverted the fuselage and canopy to an earlier version and started again. After a while I had something that seemed vaguely okay but the crew were still AWOL although everything else was still there, with no weird fuselage holes and flaps that were not animated but at least visible.

Started fiddling with the canopy to try and get the crew to appear, and finally ended up with the inner and outer layers of the canopy attached to the fuselage and the crew appearing. The downside was that I now had a multimaterial that I really didn't want to see in an AI project.

So, I thought to myself, "there's nothing to lose, I have plenty of fallback saves that I've made en-route, I can always revert", so I assigned the combined fuselage and canopy to the standard material for the one BMP the project uses. The multi-material had been created because the canopy uses transparency and, um, the fuselage doesn't, so it was effectively 2 materials for one object, except that now I no longer had material transparency for the canopy, just the alpha channel. I thought I was going out on a limb with this, but for some strange reason it actually worked. What's more, the fuselage and flaps had no vanishing sections.

Being shortcut-guy I thought "what the heck, I'll revert the flap names to lose the zbias_01_ prefix before I start in on creating a dummy object to get the wrongly-named flaps to animate again. Just to see what happens."

Well there's a thing. I have normally named flaps, visible crew, no fuselage holes and I'm back to having no zbias_01_ prefixed parts at all! I'm back where I started except that the canopy no longer has transparency specified in the material (so the project is actually reduced by one material) and both inner and outer parts are attached to the fuselage when previously only the outer one was attached - because the inner one hid the crew last time it was set up this way!

I'd swear that if the wind was blowing easterly one day, I'd get a problem after compilation, and when it switched around the darn thing would compile just fine.

My model is now simpler and works, it seems I just had to run around a loop of experiments to get back to where I was before, except that now it works. I can't help wondering whether this "fix" will be as temporary as the "group a few bits and see what happens" approach.

I think I'd better do all the LODs and versions in this Gmax session (perhaps leave it active all night), because the act of shutting down Gmax is probably enough to upset the whole house of cards.

And before anyone mentions it, yes, I have read the part in the manual about exporting models during the full moon. :)
 
Sorry to hear about all of your problems, HFTB. Horrible to go through so many issues... I know very well what its like.

Some tips, just in case you do not know about them.


1. First; Gmax can start to stumble and things start doing crazy stuff. Disappearing right command panel, super tiny Vertices on the screen (barely visible), part scales down to a dot and cant be restored, (exit without saving to save the poor parts life), etc, etc, etc. When this happens, reboot Gmax.

2. Second, you will want to constantly save upwards. Do not be worried to have 200 or even 400 saves on a project. Save, save, save. You can delete them or back them up later after all is finished.

3. Do not have Screensaver or Sleep modes 'on' and Gmax 'on' also. Never never never..... If you do, that could be your issues. Turn off sleep mode, or just never let it sleep, or screen/save with Gmax on. Turn it off. Less things can go wrong there.

EDIT: Here is one I just remembered; If you go to open a file and it doesnt open (error issue) and you try the second save back and it too has an error, close Gmax, and turn off the computer and reboot it and see if the issue is still there. Usually it can fix the issue, like as though it were a memory bug or something. If the files are wiped out, corrupt, then look for the Autoback saves, check their dates and times for the right one. Remember, Autobacks have their own file type formats, so on the bottom of the explorer window, click file types from Gmax to 'All'. Then the Autobacks will appear in the Autoback folder.

Thats all I can think of for now. There are more. This will help if you arent doing these things though.

With visibility issues, sounds like you are in FS2004 SDK. I do not miss that now. Since Prepar3D, I am no longer worried about exporting super models with vertice distance crumpling and other goofy things. (parts visibility issues, etc, etc). (takes a deep breath). The pains we have gone through to make the best things we can. The pains.......




Bill
 
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Well, the weird thing is, Bill, that I did stick to reasonable practices. Its a simple AI model and I'm now on incremental save #99, and that doesn't include branches where I was experimenting and also saving as I went along. I've been bitten by Gmax often enough that I save regularly and wear titanium gloves while I do so! I still get caught flatfooted once in a while, but my swearing is now under control and the therapist says I can soon use both arms to type because the straitjacket is coming off soon. That'll be nice.

Its just this ridiculous Gmax rite-of-passage that to make an improvement to a model that involves 2 minor changes, I'm still at the point where I have to make a 2-day detour through several arcane procedures to get there. The most irritating aspect in most ways is that the same process done directly might not actually work - its almost as though the most direct route is actually around the houses after all. What I find almost debilitating is the notion that something I tried 20 iterations ago without success might work later on due to some unrelated change in the model that I made en-route. It makes learning very haphazard, and my university studies almost a cinch by comparison (at least there the information is all laid out before me).

I'm not especially vexed by it, it just seems so unnecessary at times. Gmax sometimes leaves me feeling that I had to walk around the world to get to a place 50 yards from where I started out.

I did learn something, though, that I can use zbias_nn_ prefixes in my part names, not just textures, not just materials... the model might have made a small step, but the learning did actually make something of a leap.

The thing is now complete (unless Gmax decides otherwise), so I'm into the LOD modelling now. Question now is whether I make 16 variations or just the 8!? (2/3-blade props, spats-pants or none, cover when inactive or not, reflective textures or not - and all the permutations). Seems rather excessive for an RV4!
 
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Wow, im new to this modelling stuff...should i give up before i start and go back to making balsa wood Radio control aircraft?

I have decided against the gmax pathway. I have the following
1. 3dsmax versions 2010-2012 x 32bit on Win8 OS,
2. Blender versions 2.49 & 2.63

Im not sure which is better, still only a couple of weeks into the learning process for these two (if i were a fishing man id call them Marlins, its been a heck of a fight so far).

I'd dearly love it if Blender had an "Fsx-2-Blender" script or a "Prepar3d-2-Blender" script as is the case for X-plane (even though it would seem that the "x-plane2Blender" script is now not completely functional with x-plane and Blender in their latest versions...i think the guy that wrote it has lost interest and moved on).

I think i like blender modelling best so at the moment im considering making the meshes in Blender and exporting those to 3dsmax for manipulationg prior to compilation. I dont know if this will work for fsx and prepar3d or not!
 
adamjedgar said:
...I think i like blender modelling best so at the moment im considering making the meshes in Blender and exporting those to 3dsmax for manipulationg prior to compilation...
Click to expand...

You can build your mesh in Blender and export to Max if you want but all animations and material assignments will have to be done in Max. For Max 2010 to 2012 you'll need the P3D sdk since the FSX tools don't work in Max newer than version 2008. I just hope Win8 isn't a stumblingblock when you come to export to FSX: afaik it doesn't support DirectX 9 which you need for FSX.

Instead of the two-stage learning, why not just buckle down to learning Max? That way you have a one-stop shop and lots of people here know a thing or two about Max when you get stuck.


Since you are running Windows 8, could you tell us if FSX runs in it? I certainly don't know but would like to!
 
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If I had 3DSMax I'd not go the Gmax route either, since 3DS is supported, more compete and apparently not prone to some of the niggling faults of Gmax (I hear much about the way 3DS does the finer work so much better, etc).

As it is, I was just dropping by this post to see what I'd done right last time because my present transparency (an ultra-basic AI model of a Druine Turbulent that I'm aiming to complete in 3 days, this is day 2) is doing the exact same thing. The irritating thing is that I've already done the exact same work on the Turb canopy and it is not working this time...

Gmax is a cure for sanity.

Not that I would notice, of course.
 
Bill's post above made me remember having a save introduce a corruption for no obvious reason. That was another of Gmax's gifts to mankind. I've thought, no problem, that's what autosave is for...only to find I can't open those either....the corruption seems to be there too!!

At which point the only thing I've found that sometimes works is to open a new file and "merge" the parts from the corrupt one.
 
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