Project VF-25 'Messiah'

jangofett287

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After working on this silently for a little while, and finally having something to show for it, I've decided to starts a Dev thread for my VF-25 'Messiah' fighter craft from the anime "Macross Frontier".

As I said, after a short while of silently working, I Finally have an orbiter screenshot to show, and here it is:
picture.php

there are 4 main problems I need to address at the minute:
  1. The mesh center is in the wrong place, and the entire mesh is facing the wrong direction. this is due to a mistake I made while making the mesh, and I should be able to correct it quite easily.
  2. The engines and RSCs are wildly over powered, however at the minute this is nothing more than some config tweaks to solve.
  3. There are no engine exaust flames or smoke. I have no idea how to fix this.
  4. The cockpit roof is causing the mesh to be incorrectly rendered when looking through it. I have no idea how to solve this.

But apart from that, everything is going well, and for some reason, there don't seem to be any texture files required. BONUS!!!
:feedback:
 

N_Molson

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The cockpit roof is causing the mesh to be incorrectly rendered when looking through it. I have no idea how to solve this.

I had the same problem. Try to invert normals.

There are no engine exaust flames or smoke. I have no idea how to fix this.

Make a .dll . A nice mesh is a good start, but the code under the hood makes the addon :p
 

liber

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The mesh center is in the wrong place, and the entire mesh is facing the wrong direction. this is due to a mistake I made while making the mesh, and I should be able to correct it quite easily.

You have in orbiter Directory: \orbiter100830\Orbitersdk\utils

Shipedit is useful for editing mesh orientation,rotating,scaling...etc.


[*]There are no engine exaust flames or smoke. I have no idea how to fix this.

Spacecraft3 or dll or?


[*]The cockpit roof is causing the mesh to be incorrectly rendered when looking through it. I have no idea how to solve this.

Before converting to orbiter mesh,you need to copy same mesh group and past it at same position and invert,orbiter render only one side of the face,so to trick that create extra face but invert.

Nice work.
 

Frogisis

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Aw dang! I will be spending a lot of time in THAT sweet baby's cockpit when this is finished. Best of luck working on it.

Now I wonder if someone will make the SDF-1....
 

weirdguy

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Well, I don't know how to go about it, but I have made 3D models that can be transformed.

Animating it will be the problem. This is why I have never bothered to upload them to the net. I figure somebody will be upset that they don't animate.

vt.jpg

Macross1.JPG
 

Eccentrus

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perhaps it can be done in orbiter, by a very complex mechanism, sort of the gear retraction etc. under steroid? but then again I'm no developer...
 

Hielor

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As long as the transformation can be modelled as a series of rotations and translations, you can do it in Orbiter.
 

jangofett287

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UPDATE: I am Still working on this, the mesh is now displaying in the right position, but it comes in several thousand pieces. I've been trying to turn it into a single part, and still keep the texture, but its not going well. I'll get there, don't worry, it just may take a long time, oh, and I may one day make one that will be able to transform, but don't hold your breath...
 

Urwumpe

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Animating it will be the problem. This is why I have never bothered to upload them to the net. I figure somebody will be upset that they don't animate.

If the problem is just mechanical nature, like by rotation and translations, any C++ coder can help you. Spacecraft3.dll can do most of the stuff, but it gets very tough if you have pretty complex animations, (then you need to break sequences into small segments, etc). C++ has some advantages there by permitted mathematical functions as input for animations.

You should upload them in my opinion, since Macross is the next closest to BattleTech (historically) and I would be tempted to do the animations, though I currently have another animation problem to fix (though no longer the VAB door animation, the problem is now just in the scheduling of tasks from Lua into the high bay door task scheduler there ;) )

But before you upload, get a nice copy-left license for your work selected, and write a short short manual about the meshes. If you want to be very developer friendly, make sure your meshes use good logical labels for the mesh groups, this makes development a lot easier. The manual doesn't need much, since you just do meshes, but it would be good to tell what file is what mesh, what textures and meshes make up your add-on, explain group labels as much as needed and of course write how you want to be credited for your work. a small HTML file would be enough there.
 

weirdguy

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I think it might be easier to cheat a bit by having 4 models of the valkyrie. One as a plane, another as the robot, and a few in between in a transitory state.

Then to transform you swap out the 3D models to the intermediate looking ones for just a split second.
 

Eccentrus

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well, we can save the "create-and-destroy" the models as it transform by making the plane into several modules, i.e. di engine block/feet are two meshes, and a mesh for the head, a mesh for almost anything that would be required to move when it transform, so the final transformable would be a meshgroup of 20-30 meshes which moves in accordance when it transforms from plane mode to humanoid mode, well, we've all already seen complex gear retracting animations which uses about 3-5 meshes in it, this, in principle is just extending it further. but then again, I expect that this kind of solution wouldn't be without its own problems, especially about programming the meshgroup's translations, and about having that many meshes running around in orbiter, but then again, if one can do this, this could open up many new kinds of vessels in orbiter, Gundam anyone? :hmm:
 

Izack

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well, we can save the "create-and-destroy" the models as it transform by making the plane into several modules, i.e. di engine block/feet are two meshes, and a mesh for the head, a mesh for almost anything that would be required to move when it transform, so the final transformable would be a meshgroup of 20-30 meshes which moves in accordance when it transforms from plane mode to humanoid mode, well, we've all already seen complex gear retracting animations which uses about 3-5 meshes in it, this, in principle is just extending it further. but then again, I expect that this kind of solution wouldn't be without its own problems, especially about programming the meshgroup's translations, and about having that many meshes running around in orbiter, but then again, if one can do this, this could open up many new kinds of vessels in orbiter, Gundam anyone? :hmm:
I'd prefer just taking a long, long time to animate it. As long as the number of polygons doesn't get too huge it shouldn't be too horrible. A good preexisting example is the ITS Solar Module addon. It has a very complex unfolding animation with a huge number of parts, and causes a bit of lag while moving, but nothing too serious.

IIRC the transformation is actually only possible with the magic of 2-D animation, isn't it? (The legs do end up somehow attached to the nose...)
 
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