Pre-fab space station update

[Andy44]

Well, I've made some progress.

I've noticed two things about Urwumpe's Anim8or plug-in:

1. It creates the mesh about 2.5-3 times bigger than 3ds2msh does. I always wondered why my meshes never seemed to be as big as the grid lines in Anim8or say they are; I guess it's because 3ds2msh makes them too small. I had to use Mesh Wizard to shrink my station back down to its original size so that it fits inside the Nova rocket fairing, and so that all the animation pivot points are still valid. This discrepancy is probably the source of my scale problem, as well.

2. It somehow screws up the group names. What you see in Mesh Wizard and MeshC isn't what you get in Orbiter. In order to figure out which groups were the window panes on the centrifuge, for instance, I had to resort to trial and error, reloading the scenario until the proper groups rotated. I'm still going through this process with some other elements, and it's a pain the ass all the way. That's why this is taking so much time. This must be a bug in the export plug-in.

I'll have to resize the PMA to scale it with a Space Shuttle ODS, too. Hope that doesn't screw up the group numbers.

At least it's pretty! Much more professional looking than the 3ds2msh output. So this is still in the works. If 3ds2msh worked properly, I'd have released this 2 weeks ago, but I want to get it right, first.

 

[computerex]

Hi Andy. For finding proper mesh groups, why not use Orbiter's Mesh Debug plug-in ?

 

[Andy44]

I'm ignorant. How does that work?

 

[computerex]

I'm ignorant. How does that work?

Well you just activate the plug-in under the launchpad, and it will be usable in session by CTRL + F4, and choosing the plug-in from the custom plug-in list. Then you can select different mesh groups on the vessel, and it makes them blink.

 

[Andy44]

Okay, giving that a try now...

 

[Andy44]

Okay, that mesh debug thing really works! How'd I go this long without knowing what it was for?

So, all my animations are good to go! Next, to resize the Shuttle PMA.

Also, I have to tone down the materials' ambient light settings, since the station looks like it's glowing in the dark when its in eclipse.

 

[tblaxland]

I'm ignorant. How does that work?

And honest, to boot :rofl:

 

[Andy44]

Allll-righty-then!

Centrifuge spin-up: CHECK

Docking arm, tunnels, antenna deployments: CHECK

Docking port placement: CHECK

Launch vehicle fit-tests: CHECK

Just need to touch up some materials and put together an upload package for Orbithangar. I'm going to take my time and fly it myself to give it a good shakedown before releasing it.

There's an embarrasing issue with scale. The sizes of all my addons are based on the Simple Tank Payload, which is sized to fit in a shuttle payload bay. The docking port sizes are loosely based on that, and so they they are all too small. And so when I built this station's shuttle PMA, it was too small. I scaled up the PMA part of the mesh to look right when docked to a shuttle ODS, so a careful observer will notice that the other docking ports are smaller. Also, the size of the station is just big enough to fit inside a CVEL Nova-SSTO, which, by my figuring, is scaled smaller than stock Atlantis and shuttle fleet, which means that it looks kind of small next to Atlantis.

Oh well, scale compromises must be made to work between different add-ons, and I think it's for the best at this point.

One half-assed solution would be to make a pre-separation mesh for the launch vehicle which is scaled for the launcher, and then switch to a larger mesh upon separation which is scaled up a bit. Both CVEL and Multistage2 can support this, but it looks stupid and ruins the magic of the launch.