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P3D v2 United States Navy -- all of it.

Messages
717
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us-texas
Still chugging along -- returned home after being away on family vacation for a week. Glad to be back.

If I somehow manage to break even on this little escapade, then I think I will move forward and do the naval fleets of other countries, eg. Canada, Australia, etc.
 
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309
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netherlands
Don't think too far ahead ;) The US Navy has plenty of things for you to model!

And some Russian carriers would be so incredibly cool too!
 
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717
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us-texas
I have all the models already. Now it is all about animations and repaints, and of course the carriers. Still much to do, but at least I got them compiled and sailing.
 
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1,049
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australia
USS America LHA-6


Empty deck configuration, followed by various other deck parking confugations:






Haven't decided how many configurations to include, but it will be a half dozen or more, certainly. We'll see.

That sounds like a big job. Good luck.

It looks to me like there are some really nasty smoothing group issues with this model though. It happens when you have a smoothing group for one side that meets another smoothing group with the same number at a sharp angle. The result is the smoothed surface normals can end up doing some unnatural things which give you the nasty lighting you can see on the hull sides and the sides of the island. The solution is to go through the model and ensure you don't have unique numbers for any smoothing groups where they might meet.
 
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1,049
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australia
I'll show you with a couple of pictures.

Here is a picture of a 3 simple tubes. Each is identical except for the smoothing groups.

The first one on the left does not have any smoothing group so you can see the polygons making up the sides.

The second, in the middle has had all the sides assigned to a single smoothing group (you can have many smoothing groups with each group having a different number). The surface normals (which determine how light reflections will be calculated) are averaged over the surface of the polygon and this produces a nice rounded shading effect.

The third, on the right, shows what happens if you make the end caps the same smoothing group as the sides. The result is unrealistic shading as the rendering engine is trying to average surface normals for polygons that meet at 90 degree angles.

Image1.jpg


On Harry Truman CVN-75 I can see smoothing group artifacts on the sides of the ship. This is easy to spot as there are unnatural patches of light and dark on the sides and those patches are square and triangular in shape (meaning they follow the lines of individual polygons). I have highlighted a few of these spots in the picture below:
LHA6config0.jpg


You (or your modeler) need to load this model into a modeling program and select groups of polygons and assign them to their own smoothing groups.
 

Dutcheeseblend

Resource contributor
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1,541
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netherlands
The number of vertices is higher in your second case than in your first case, Anthony. Maybe the shading of the boat is a result of some kind of vertex welding?
 
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717
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us-texas
I got it loaded up in Blender, if one of you can give me some pointers on what to look for, what menus to use.

I notice under NORMALS that there is a box to click AUTO-SMOOTH, and it is not clicked. That probably isn't what you are talking about here, however.
 
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1,049
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australia
@Dutcheeseblend. The number of vertices are identical in all three cylinders. The ONLY difference is smoothing groups. I use FSDS and it is stupidly easy to make smoothing groups. I just select the appropriate polygons, press F2 and select a smoothing group number.

Gmax (and I presume 3DS) uses a similar method.

You might be right about the vertice welding being the cause of the problem. Sometimes, if you weld some vertices you can end up with a left over polygon with no width between two points.

As for Blender, I demoed Blender a year or so ago and definitely one of the things that was a deal breaker for me was how Blender handled smoothing groups which was terrible. There are some tutorials if you google "Blender smoothing groups" that involve making "sharp edges" but I could never figure out how you set the smoothing group number (or even if you could).

The attached pic shows the polygon properties in FSDS. Multiple polygons are selected (yellow highlighted) and all I do is pick a number (and make sure there aren't any other smoothing groups with the same number that are intersecting at a bad angle) and press enter.

Image1.jpg
 

Dutcheeseblend

Resource contributor
Messages
1,541
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netherlands
@Anthony31: thank you, I was misinterpreting some things. Indeed, this might be because Blender handles it very differently. Basically, we have 'Flat' shading and 'Smooth' shading.
 
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1,049
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australia
That looks much neater. And nice that it is an easy fix (although I don't know how long you spent trying to find the fix :) ).
 
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717
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us-texas
Spent about 5-10 minutes guessing what to try first in Blender, after seeing your post. Probably spent about 20-30 minutes trying to understand your post and ultimately never did make heads or tails of it.

Fortunately I hit on my first guess (given your clues) and it worked. Thanks in any case, Anthony and Dan for giving me some hints that steered me in the right direction.
 
Messages
717
Country
us-texas
Wow, has it already been a year?

Well I have just about all my ships done and in the sim. Not quite all but nearly. And most of the hulls are repainted....

But the aircraft carrier is really the biggest bear. The thing works with some basic animations (keeping my elevators static for now), and I even have by catapults and jet blast deflectors working. Haven't tried to land on it yet (always a challenge) so still testing it. I will say that even FPS is OK if you are flying around it or very near it. But LAND on it, try to taxi around, and frames plummet hard. Like 1 or 2 frames per second. So that is my big problem right now, and I have been trying to figure out the cause of that.
 
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Messages
717
Country
us-texas
Alright I might have figured it out. It must have something to do with hardened surfaces, if the problem arises only when I am 'touching the deck'.

OK so I had been using auto-platform in MCX, and as a result my model was showing something like over 7000 separate platform attachments. I decided that was probably part of my problem, if not all of it, but how to test it?

Here is what I did.



I made one flat platform, and did not worry about it overlapping, just for testing purposes. And after one test it worked great. Exactly ZERO frame rate loss. None. I was switching back and forth between inside and outside views and never fell below 29-30 FPS (I am locked at 30).

Now this will at least allow me to continue my testing of cats and arresting wires.

Later I can circle back and try to match the platform up with the deck textures ONLY (my problem here is that I have one texture sheet for the whole ship). So I need to figure that out.
 
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717
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us-texas
Damn, the thing works!! All 4 cats are operational and I managed an ugly 1-wire trap in Dino's T-45. What a relief that is!

Now I just need to make the platform match up better with the deck and I am in good shape!

Wow.
 
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