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Blender to FSX - Skinned meshes mini-tutorial

Hi Daan,

Felix had examined my landing gear at the beginning of 2015. Given its complexity (multiple inverse kinematics ...), he advised me to use version 7.3. With version 8.4, the objects of my landing gear are placed "anarchic" (this is not the right word, it's just to explain ...!).

Your help is welcome! ... I may send you the blend file, but I do not know by which way ... Tell me how you send it!

Thanks again for everything...
 
Hi Chris,

I see...
I'd like to help you on the files themselves, but since I am quite restricted in time now, that will be difficult and frustrating. We might however try to solve the problem with a few figures.
What exactly is not working correctly?

Daan
 
With version 7.03, I could not use a skinned mesh to my landing gear (over 20 objects are used tot move and to retract the wheel). So I create a complex structure whose bones are moving exactly following the diagram provided for extending and retracting the landing gear. Each bone is useful parent of one of the objects constituting my landing gear. ... And it works!

In version 8.4, with exactly the same blend, it works, but ... all my objects are moved in space, far from each other. What seems to work is the entertainment: my objects move in the right direction, but as their initial position is incorrect ... everything is wrong!

Blender in action ...:

Landing%20Gear%201.png


Landing%20Gear%202.png


Landing%20Gear%203.png



Result FSX with version 8.4:

B2FSX%20v8.4.png


And result in FSX with version 7.03:

B2FSX%20v7.04.png


With skinned mesh, the results are reversed: in version 7.03, the result is catastrophic in FSX !!! And works well (I think ...) with version 8.4.

So I don't know what to do for my whole project works, and absolutely any help is welcome.

Thank you, Daan, take the time to consider my worries ...!
 
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Can't see your pictures Chris, probably you should make them public in your hosting service ;-)
 
Hi Daan,

Always problems to display images, be it with Google Drive or onedrive ... !!! :banghead:

Here are the links, hoping that it works!
https://drive.google.com/open?id=0BwTIiG805HK0UXV0TnZ6MmZGQUE
https://drive.google.com/open?id=0BwTIiG805HK0T1lndHRhc2pXdmc
https://drive.google.com/open?id=0BwTIiG805HK0RWVHVUg2UWlsNGM
https://drive.google.com/open?id=0BwTIiG805HK0UXNWaWpmSERKYmM
https://drive.google.com/open?id=0BwTIiG805HK0WmdocDBIODlqbWc

I also tested my pilot and yours, with both Blender version, to be certain of what I said : the skinned mesh work extremely badly under version 7.04 of Blender to FSX. Version 8.4 works much better, but the result in FSX is not absolutely identical that what is in Blender ... It is only with me, or for you too...?

If I do not find a solution, I think to do like you do for your Fokker D.21, that is to say, let my pilot with statics arms and legs, and just model the movement of the head ... It's very frustrating to not be able to successfully complete this model. But I hope that Felix will complete his wonderful add-on for that developers can work with Blender ...

Thank you for everything
 
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Hi. I had problems with pilots animations in Blender 8.4. My result was more or less the same. It appeared in a wrong position in FSX. My solution was quite simple, but took me a lot of
trial and error procceses. I found that every bone in the mesh has to be animated.

In my initial model, some bones did not move, so I didn't record animation frames for them. What I did to solve the issue was to select all bones, and record the 0 and 100 animation frames for all ("I" key and rotation in my case). Then I edited the animations for all those bones I wanted to animate. Exported and it worked fine.

Something I have experienced is that from one time to another, even after saving the .blend file, the animation (saved frames) of the bones without an animation tag assigned is missing, and you get the same error (the mesh not showing, or showing in wrong place). To correct this I asign an animation tag to EVERY bone. The bone will not move, because the initial and the final frames are the same, and this prevents the frames to dissapear from one time to another.


Perhaps this is not your problem, but who knows. Sorry for my english!
 
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Hi @palacio802,

The solution that I used for the the pilot animation is : in Pose Mode, select Pose menu > Animation > Action Bake... Named a small Frame Step (minimum 10), deselect Only Selected and selects Visual Keying + Clear Constraint + Clear Parents. Bake Data on Pose. Then, before exporting the FSX format to create your .mdl file, select one bone of your Armature, and start the compilation!

This works for me ...

Good luck!
 
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