Bullethead

With mucho help, especially from Hairyspin, I finally got the cowling done and can now move on to other things. FINALLY!! Drinks on me . I ended up detaching the cowling as a separate object for seveal reasons. Once I get the cockpit area shaped, I will need to delete 1/2 the fuselage when I start work on the tail and strut attachment points. The cowling is asymmetrical (more slots on right side) so can't be cloned and mirrored when I make the recreate the deleted 1/2 of the fuselage. And no way was I going to fill in the extra holes on the cloned half--WAY too much work. With the cowling as a separate object sans firewall, I can easily gain access to its inner surfaces for texturing. Having it separate makes a realistic slight discontinuity between it and the fuselage. After all, the cowling was a separate piece in real life. The cowling was made as follows (per Hairyspin's instructions): Extruded outer shape from firewall and deleted end cap poly, leaving the fuselage with an open front end (no more firewall) and the outer surface still part of the fuselage. Cut, shaped, smoothed, and otherwise fiddled all day with all the damn holes and slots. Cloned the outer surface, shrunk it just a hair, closed the rear end with a firewall, and flipped the normals to make the inner surface. Attached the inner surface to the fuselage and welded the front opening of inner and outer surfaces. This is what I posted pics of last night. Once I decided to make the cowl a separate object, I proceeded as follows: Selected and detached all cowling polys (inner and outer) EXCEPT the firewall, and hid this. The firewall was left, but because it had been part of the shrunken inner cowling originally, it had a small gap all the way around between it and the fuselage sides. So I moved most of its vertices out and welded them to the end vertices of the fuselage side polys. I made an edge across the lower part of the firewall and deleted this new poly, leaving the firewall flat on the bottom. Then I cut the bottom fuselage stringer edges at the point where the lower fuselage slants up to meet bottom of the firewall and deleted the parts from there to the front. I did it this way instead of Boolean cutting because it just seemed easier. Created new polys to make the sloping part of the fuselage between the cuts and the firewall. Hid the fuselage, unhid the cowling, and created new polys between the inner and outer surfaces in the lower arc where the bottom edge of the cowling hangs down in front of the step in the fuselage. I left the cowling in its original position in relation to the fuselage. Below is the result. I think it looks pretty good. Note that the above process cleaned up the graphical trash in Gmax's "User" view. I still have some questions, however.... The rear edges of the cowling outer surface bump up exactly with the front edges of the fuselage sides and vertices of both parts are co-located. Is this bad? Should I move the cowling forward an RCH? If I move the cowling forward, then I'll have to add more polys between its inner and outer surfaces at the back end. That would be only 14 more polys so not the big a deal, just more fiddly work. There are no polys between the inner and outer surfaces inside all the holes (7) and slots (3). This isn't really noticeable except up close and when your line of sight is pretty much tangent to the cowling's surface, as you can see in one of the attached pics. Should I add all these polys? That would be about 120 additional polys and the cowling already has a bit over 400 due to all the damn holes in it. Anyway, thanks again for the help and thanks in advance for suggestions on improvements.

Ah, good. I love it when I don't have to mess with anything . That means a lot. Thanks

Thanks, Conrad This was a rather dauntingly complex piece of airplane for a rookie. I'm proud to be done with it. But now I'm getting into the decking around the cockpit and guns, and it's even more of a challenge. The cowling, at the bottom line, is all made of standard shapes, except for the curved slot in the upper left. The cockpit decking, OTOH is best described as a blob with various holes, slots, and irregularly curved notches cut into it at strange angles, and all this has to fair neatly on top of the cylindrical fuselage. This one is definitely going to take some work..... HOWEVER, once I get THAT done, I can start on the fun parts like tail feathers and wings I picked the MS-AI because I thought at 1st glance it would be fairly simple. Only 1 wing, simple tail surfaces, round fuselage. Little did I know........

Well, the Booleans (reference, cut, refine) do seem to have the virtue of being able to cut more than 1 surface at a time, and also seem to leave fewer spare vertices than spline cutting. So I think I'll be doing all my cuts that way now. Thanks for telling me what settings to use. After further review, this seems to be just an artifact of the Gmax "User" view. When I change it to "Perspective", all the trash goes away.

I think you misunderstood me. At the front, flak owned the "right of way". It could shoot at any enemy planes it wanted to, and if friendly planes decided to attack enemy planes that were under fire by flak, that was at their own risk. So, at the front, don't complain about being nailed by friendly flak, because the rules are in flak's favor. OTOH, at London, flak was under clear orders to fill given areas of sky with shrapnel. Most of this was unaimed barrage fire to deny airspace. But even when aimed, they just had indistinct searchlight sightings at best, mostly just sound. IOW, they couldn't easily tell friend from foe. So again, friendly planes entered flak zones at their own risk. The only diference between this and the front was that around London flak couldn't shoot everywhere, while at the front it could.

No kidding. I must have spent 8 hours on that today Yours look better than most stock models, with the round rear edges.

I've been wanted to extrude edges. Thanks for the tip on that . Nice to know the differences. When I did it with a separate piece, the gap between fuselage and cowling was 1mm so the gap would only be visible when viewed from precisely the correct angle. You'd never see it from your own cockpit. But just maybe, in an external view or if you were fighting my plane, you'd see the gap if you were precisely 90^ to it. So I didn't think the gap per se would be a big deal. I was more worried about z-buffer issues when viewed from non-90^ angles, like maybe if you were looking at the plane from an angle to the front, you'd see the firewall on top of the cowling, like how it shows up in Gmax. I spent ALL DAMN DAY working on the cowling, which is a pretty complex POS. I was doing it as in your email, outside only, then clone, flip, and shrink the inside. Below are the results. Mucho fiddling with vertices, edges, and smoothing groups to try to eliminate dents and shadows on the finished product as much as possible. I got about 99^ of them ironed out, can't get the the rest any better, and figure "it's done". You can only see what remains if you look really close from just the right angles, so they aren't a big deal IMHO. I'm particularly proud of the the long, narrow, curved slot in the cowl front at 10 o'clock as you see it from the front. That was a real MF. However, as you can see, the firewall causes a z-buffer problem in Gmax. Will that show up in the game? If so, then I think making the cowling as a separate object would be better. When I did it that way, there as no z-buffer problem in Gmax. Besides, it would be MUCH easier to texture the inside that way. I suppose I can do that by detatching the present cowling rather than having to start over--I sure don't want to go through making all those holes and slots again. What do you think? I haven't haven't gotten to cutting the "organ pipe" gap in the lower fuselage yet, but that shouldn't be a problem. Thanks muchos for telling me how to do Booleans without things going completely to crap. Anyway, thanks to everybody for the help, and please feel free to point out what I did wrong here, so I can fix it.

Damn, you work fast . Nice job on the hinges, too.

Well, if turning on labels briefly is too anti-immersion for you, you can always go through the new pilot creation process for the country and type (fighter or bomber) you're interested in. Then just select each squadron in turn until you see a picture of its insignia. For lower-numbered squadrons, you should also set the date to that of your last mission, because they often changed their names and insignia. Higher-numbered squadrons, however, tended to keep their insignia throughout. And this isn't anti-immerision. Think of it as paging through the intel reports in the squadron office after your mission.

Very pretty shot, and cool nightfighter skin

I'm still digesting it. It was a BIG meal . All the Gmax tricks in it are worth the price of admision by themselves. Many thanks. So, is it better to do it that way or to make the cowl a separate object? If it's separate, you get a bit of discontinuity in the surface, which is realistic, but at the price of some additional polys, most of which aren't ever seen, and perhaps some z-buffer issues as a result. I take it Boolean is better than splining? Thanks for pointing out how to make that work. I tried that before using a spline and ended up with total crap. Like my 12-sided cylinder I was using to make the whole produced a partial 6-sided hole all pluged up with polys I couldn't delete.

Does cutting holes cause problems down the road? Is there then another method for making holes like this? Thanks. That sounds nice and simple, which my Paleolithic mind can handle . Geez, there's so much about Gmax I don't know. Technically speaking, what's the difference between an editable poly and an editable mesh? And why do you have to convert from one to the other to do some things like flip normals (which I sure can't see how to do with it as an editable poly)? And can your finished model have any editable meshes left at the end, or do they all need to be ediable polys or some other sort of thing? Thanks again!

I haven't had a chance to fly the patch-revised DH5 until now. All I can say is, WOW!!! Forget everything I've said bad about this plane in its original incarnation. The thing is now fairly competitive at low altitude. Gone is the inability to climb, gone are the horrific gust responses, gone is the tendency to spin in any sort of ACM-related turn. Don't get me wrong. The DH5 is no shining star in terms of ACM by the standards of its day. Think of it as marginally better than the DH2, and without the "spinning incenerator" stuff. It's slow, rather sluggish, and subject to all the torque effects of a rotary fighter, to a rather extreme degree. Plus, except for forwards and upwards, your visibility is dangerously inadequate. However, it's now significantly better than a Fee, which it wasn't before. I haven't tried pushing its limits of climb and ceiling yet, but its initial climb is quite respectable, it can out-turn the Albatros D.V at low level, which it couldn't do before. Plus, it retains the ability for you to survive horrific crashes. I just shot down 3 Albatri with it in a campaign mission, without taking a single hit in return. Now granted, I can now fly with less than 100% fuel, which doubtless plays a part in the improved performance. However, I don't think the weight difference alone accounts for the improvements. So, belated kudos to OBD! I hope other folks will now give this plane a try. If you want something more challenging than other mid-1917 Entente fighters but don't want to fly a 2-seater, this is a good plane to try.

I haven't had much chance to work on this for the past month or 2. What little time I had I used to refine the fuselage taking the above suggestions to heart, and I think it looks pretty good now. One of the reasons for spending so much time on the fuselage was because I couldn't figure out a way to do the cowlling. It doesn't lend itself to being extruded from the fuselage because of the opening at the firewall. I tried a bunch of ways to do that, all to no avail. However, now that I know it's OK to use separate objects, I was able to make it, as shown below. It still needs a few more holes and the existing holes need to be cleaned up, but I think it's coming along OK. It doesn't QUITE touch the fuselage or overlap it at all, BTW. However, I've run into a couple of problems: 1. Annoying Shadows The main one is on the side of the fuselage, but there are small ones around the holes in the cowling. From my previous work, I know that it's possible to iron these wrinkles out by playing with smoothing groups, but nothing I've tried from the various vids has worked. Any ideas? 2. I am completely unable to make the cowling holes go all the way through. The cowling was made as a very thin-walled tube, which I extruded, uniformed scaled down, extruded again, etc. I cut the holes in the front surface with a 12-sided ngon spline using the "cookie cutter" option on the ShapeMerge. When I did this, the ngons were out on front of the cowling so made holes in the front surface. Then I moved the ngons behind the cowling and tried the same thing, but nothing happened. Any ideas how to fix that? Thansk again for the help.

Actually, this is exactly what they did on the Western Front. The whole sky was a free fire zone for flak and it was up to the friendly planes to stay clear or get into it. Around London, things were different. There, they had alternating rings for flak and fighters. Flak only fired in its zones, and the fighters were supposed to stay in theirs although they usually flew into the flak zones at their own risk. But bear in mind that London had somewhat more flak guns than the entire Brit sector of the Western Front. Even in late 1918 when the Germans had pretty much quit their raids. So with orders of magnitude denser flak at home, I can see them thinking that separate fighter and flak rings were necessary. And just as Home Defense fighters usually ignored their geographical limits with usually no harm done, why should anybody worry about friendlies in the much lighter flak at the front? "Kill them all. God will recognize his own."

That seems to have improved significantly as the war went on. I found a cool article by Bletchley over at the Aerodrome on this subject: http://http://www.theaerodrome.com/forum/reference-articles/24267-some-observations-german-anti-aircraft-fire-over-western-front-1914-1918-a.html

Flak can shoot very low indeed. The most extreme case I know of is if you fly for Jasta 4 in about July 1918, whenver it is when they get D.VIIs. Their airfield is actually in amongst the trenches, where gas clouds sometimes blow across the runway. At this airfield, you start taking flak during your takeoff roll, before you leave the ground. Never a dull moment there . As for how high it shoots, I don't think there's a plane in OFF that can climb completely out of its reach. However, high alitude minimizes your exposure due the combination of vertical and horiztontal distance. The gun's field of fire is a hemisphere so is narrower at the top than at the bottom. The higher you fly, therefore, the more directly over the guns you have to fly for them to be able to shoot at you. Thus, at high altitude, you can fly between defended locations without getting shot at, where at lower levels 1 or both would be able to range you. As such, you can avoid all flak except that at your target itself. Flak's accuracy isn't very good, but it does seem to improve over time the longer they shoot at you, provided you hold a steady course. It appears that flak is most accurate at short range, but this is hard to quantify because I hardly ever see the guns themselves. Thus, I equate short range with low altitude. But again, letting them have repeated shots at you while you hold steady seems to be the worse thing you can do. Fortunately, when I'm at low altitude, I'm usually in some wild furball so this isn't a problem. But what you have to look out for then is the AAMGs, which are WAY more deadly than flak. Probably the worst thing you can do as far as flak goes is fly along straight and level at about say 3-5000 feet, just above the reach of AAMGs. All that said, I hardly ever get hit by flak. Most of these occasions were when on bomb runs at medium to high level, when I had to fly straight. The other times I've been hit were when the flak was bursting below and behind the enemy 2-seater I was attacking.

Then you, Sir, have received some of the juju, and I most definitely need to shake your hand, so maybe some of it will rub off on me

Yup, one of my favorite Jarheads. Whenever I've had the priviledge of leading men in battle, whether against bullets or fire, I've always looked to him for inspiration. To me, he is the tribal ancestor spirit with by far the most juju. I knew this to be true before even before I'd ever heard of him, from my 1st awful night in bootcamp. After we'd been stripped, shaved, and bombarded with our gear (to be taken out of our first few dozen paychecks), they put us in a room where we filled out paperwork. Meanwhile, the receiving barracks DIs patrolled the aisles smacking recruits. And I looked up and saw a huge oil version of the attached photo, about 6 feet x 4 feet, hanging on the wall facing me. Looking up from my paper cost me a fist in the ear, but it was worth it to see this grim, grizzled, 2x MoH, 1x DSC badass mofo meeting my gaze, seemingly with approval. He was the sort of NCO I always wanted to grow up to be.

Somehow I'm not surprised. I bet you're a fan of the Motor City Madman, too.

But it doesn't have the KISS version, or this one, which I think is the ultimate song about Strutters: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eOYppTlU42U

I just looked and you're right, they are PDFs. How bizarre! I guess you'll have to get in touch with werewolf (click in his name and PM him) and ask him to upload them in some other format. I sure can't do anything wiht a PDF skin, and I doubt anybody else can.

Welcome aboard, Pete! New guy buys the drinks! Where are you trying to download these skins from?

Welcome aboard, Ironhat! New guy buys the drinks With the formalities followed, let's talk business. Feel free to get another drink anytime you need one . It's true, if you and the AI have the same plane, the AI's will have SLIGHTLY better performance. I've heard this is due to them having a lower gross weight than you do for a couple of reasons. But it's very important to note that 1) the AI's performance advantage is only marginal, and 2) saying #1 assumes ALL other things are equal, which isn't the case if you're thinking the AI is vastly superior. But if you are VERY familiar with your chosen mount, then all other things SHOULD be more or less equal. At that point the AI will NOT appear to be totally out-performing you, just maybe a little bit. But you should still be able to beat the AI most of the time due to your ability to improvise tactics to fit situations you're not programmed for. Like Olham, I won't be so rude as to say, "Learn to fly". In fact, have a drink on me for even implying that . But it's not rude to say, "learn to fly your plane". I'm sure you've got tons of sim experience already, or you wouldn't have posted this, but the thing is, these WW1 crates all require finesse. They have VERY tight envelopes of maximum performance, outside of which they either can't fly at all and go into killer spins, or they can barely hang in the air while the enemy does rings round them. You'll never have much success until you find your ride's sweet spot and develop the ability to stay there instinctively. And the thing is, all planes have different sweet spots, sometimes radically different, so you need to fly them all differently. It therefore takes considerable time and experience to get the most out of any OFF plane. If you're an experienced sim pilot, you can get a good feel for a certain plane after a few fights and can usually beat the AI, but true mastery takes months. OFF's been out for about a year now and I consider myself a master only in a maximum of 5 or 6 of its planes and competent in about a dozen more. While you're learning the planes, however the AI, at least of the higher skill levels, knows its evelopes to many decimal places and can hit such small targets routinely. IOW, it's getting the best out of its ride. If you aren't good with a particular plane, the AI will seem to be cheating blatantly, but as you get a handle on your ride, you'll find the AI looks less and less superhuman. Now, with all that said, I rather like it that the AI has a marginal performance advantage over me. First off, I've been flying sims, mostly MP, for decades, and have gotten drunk with Robert Shaw. As such, I know my ACM and can improvise it with a fluidity no AI, not even OFF's, can match. Thus, if the AI is a bit harder to bleed down, it's more entertaining for me. Second, I like combat, not flying around, and I have limited time to fly. Therefore, the LAST thing I want to do is waste time circling around so all my AI wingees can rejoin me after a fight. I really like how they can catch up with me, gradually, even though I'm going flat-out.

OK, thanks for the clarification. Pennance for carelessness is now possible again