posted 02-27- 08:46 AM               

K i started
well i want to start hhehe

haveing problems already. I put up a background pic to trace the splines off and it looks all messed.

Take a look.

what do you other max guys do?

posted 02-27- 09:05 AM               

Wow man that sounds like work or somthing
hehe

you mean you don't trace off the background image?

posted 02-27- 09:34 AM               

Well i'm pisssed. All i want to do is start this damn thing and max won't let me

I tried to put a the pic as a texture on a flat poly and trace off that but its just not happening.

Even when i follow the book it starts telling me to do things that just arn't there.

posted 02-27- 10:44 AM               

Well it seems if i run 3Dsmax in software mode the background pic looks much better but its really slow to zoom in and out

also i tried a different pic in 3d3 mode and it looks better but its still all messed. There no detail. Its like 3ds converts the pic to a low res version and blows it up as i zoom.

posted 02-27- 12:10 PM               

Maybe if Max is giving you trouble, try Ac3d.

------------------
Zoycite {GS}
GUNSLINGERS

visit The War Paint Factory

posted 02-27- 12:22 PM               

If you find it's running too slow in software mode, click that little icon that looks like an ice cube. It's at the bottom of the screen... the first button in that set of buttons to the left of the animate button. That will make it so it turns all the objects into bounding boxes when you rotate or pan around.... much faster.
As far as the texture resolution in the viewports, you can set that in the preferences. I have Max 2.5 and mine only goes up to like 512.
By the way, I pretty much have to run Max in software mode too. OpenGl causes wierd visual anomolies in the viewports.
There are also certain options in the preferences that can make it run a bit faster. I can't remember all of them, but one of them is preferences under the viewport tab... uncheck the box next to "Use dual planes". I don't know what it is, but it sped my viewports up a lot.
If you do a search at support.discreet.com forums, you can find a lot of solutions to Max problems.

posted 02-27- 01:05 PM               

Zoy please don't even mention Ac3d. Thats what started all this trouble.

Its a really sweet detailed plan of the P40.

JT Thanks for the tips

I tried playing with the size of the texture it loads and i can only go down. Not up. It seems like it would help too cause when you go down it gets worse. But if i go to 512 the pic just goes blank. SUcks

About the speed. Its only slow in software mode when i try to zoom in or out. Paning is no problem. I haven't tried with any 3d objects loaded though.

posted 02-27- 01:34 PM               

The added benefit to this approach is that, until you start screwing up the flight model yourself, the plane still thinks its a Typhoon, and WILL fly in the sim.

In the end, you end up doing all the same work you would do from scratch, with the important exception that you didn't have to create EVERY single shape out of nothing, and the polygon count will already be at a reasonable level (unless you make a ROUND fuselage that is like SOME planes have that is)

posted 02-27- 01:44 PM               

Thats not in me Jedi. I'm not an artist in that sence. The end result wouldn't be as good as it should be. There would be flaws.

All i want to do is load the pic as a background so i can trace over it and Max seems to not be able to handle this SIMPLE task.

I remember cursing Ac3d because you had to edit the pic to get it placed exacty center.

But now this is worse. At least you could see what you were trying to trace in ac3d.

JT- What do you do? Do you load your pic as a background or do you map it onto a poly?

What file format do you use and how big is the image in pixels?

posted 02-27- 05:55 PM               

Your problem is basically this... MAX only seems to do pixel resize when it resizes the bitmp to fit the background, not any fancy filtering or anything. So what you have got to do is resize your image in PSP or something before you use it as a background image. You may need to dick around a bit until you find the optimim size.

One other little tip. The background image slows MAX to a crawl, well it does for me anyway. The better way to get a template is to get the background image to the right scale and then create nurbs curves to outline the important parts of the shape. You can then ditch the image and use the nurbs. I'm not suggesting you do the thing in Nurbs, thats for you to decide but the Nurbs can be used as a template for the mesh building and are a hell of a lot faster than a background picture.

posted 02-27- 06:15 PM               

Yeah thanks Bryan.

I was playing around with the image and i think i can do it in software mode if i tweak the image first.

Then after i get the basic trace done i can scrap the background like you said work off the trace.

Why nurbs? Do you mean make a really good hi res 2d drawing off of the plans and then make a lower res one with less vetices for the actual loft?

Sorry i'm a bit slow. I'm just startig to learn this stuff with max.

Once i get the traced outlines like in JTs tutorial. How do i scale the fuse to its correct size? he never touches on that.

posted 02-28- 09:36 AM               

JT - Bryan - ANYBODY!!

posted 02-28- 05:52 PM               

I had a bit of trouble with nurb surfaces and lofting etc etc. The wig and fuselage looked fantastic but when I reduced the poly count it looked like crap .

So what I did was trace the plan I had, mainly the cross sections and top and side outlines, using nurbs curves. Why nurbs curves? well you can produce 'lines' in MAX that follow the drawing exactly. And because they are native MAX objects the thing doesn’t slow down dramatically. Also they scale with your object easily. You actually move the nurbs outlines around until they make a kind of weird wire outline of your aircraft, so you have a 3 dimensional template.

Then I took an existing mesh for an aircraft and moved the vertices until they lined up with the nurbs template. I used the spit as a base and I found that there were "rings" of vertices at cross-section points so all I had to do was make these 'rings' of vertices the same cross-section as my hurricane cross-sections. Of course you need to find a aircraft that’s similar in line to the one you are making.

After that I had to fine-tune a few of the faces. I had all of the vertices where I wanted them but some of the faces went every wear so I basically had to re-build a few to they sat right. Once the basic shape was right its just some more fine-tuning. For example, where the control panel meets the fuselage on the hurricane, I had to add a few verts and polys to get the curve a bit better.

One other little bit of advise, make the fuselage in one half and then make the other side, once you are happy, by using a mirror. Make sure you get the mirror transformation out of the object by doing a reset Xform and a face flip on the new fuselage half, and then join the objects and weld the verts.

For scale, you can scale the nurb template before you do any mesh work. Just find the aircraft length and span from the stats and make sure that the length and span of your template, or background image, is the same. Remember that 1 unit in MAX = 1 foot if you have a vertex scale of 1.0 in the MAX2OBJ plugin.

This is just the way a novice model builder does it so you might find other more professional methods work better for you. This worked for me anyway.

posted 02-28- 10:02 PM               

Great stuff man. I never thought of the mirror thing. Thats the shit. Last time i made a fuse in Ac3d one side was great and the other side was all wacked

THIs will help against that.