FS2004 Light with projection

[tgibson]

Hi,

Success!

Here's my result:

Looks pretty good!

I found that Sidney's tutorial works well except for one thing that Bill does - he increases the bounding box to -100, -100, -100 and 100, 100, 100. That way the light doesn't "blink" off when you look away from the pole. Neat trick, Bill. You can do that in MDL Tweaker II to avoid hand editing asm files.

My current technique:

1. Create the object in GMAX, following Sidney's tutorial. Note that all non-light objects must be linked to the light object so those objects will not be flipped in FS.

2. Export the file as a Scenery MDL file.

3. Load the MDL file into MDL Tweaker II.

4. Click the Fix BGL_LIGHT problem button.

5. Choose the Window/Statistics menu item.

6. In the resulting dialog box in the Bounding Box section, type -100 in the upper 3 boxes, and 100 in the lower 3 boxes. Close this box once you are sure you have it right (you will have to reload your MDL file to get it back, since the menu item is now grayed out).

7. Choose File/Save, and save it with the name you want.

8. Put the tweaked MDL file into a library and place it into FS. I used EZ Scenery for this.

I used Bill's values for the Light_Land material (RGB = 134, 134, 109, 60% opacity).

My light_land_01 polygon (a triangle) in the pole pictured above is raised 65 feet above the ground and is tilted 55 deg. up from straight down. light_land_02 is the same.

Hope this helps,

 

[Sidney Schwartz]

Didn't know that about the bounding box...good bit of information.

Something else to keep in mind is that you can have multiple light sources in one "fixture". For example, light source 1 would be linked objects light_land_01 and light_land_02, and light source 2 would be linked objects light_land_03 and light_land_04. The material name stays the same, light_land. Multiple "bulbs" will produce a brighter light on the tarmac. You can also angle the bulbs to produce a wider spread of light. Don't over do it as lots of lights sources will hit your frame rates pretty hard.

 

[sfrenchie]

I pat myself on the back for starting this thread
We have gotten so much information new to most of us, some technical, some practical. I want to thank the issuers of those tips/tutorials that sweated the research.

But I'm not done with my questions haha.
So far we have seen how to reuse a ready-made product from MS, that is a XXX_LIGHTS (place your orders, I have them in stock ).

For the sake of knowledge I had liked to know how they are made in the first place? Could anyone recreate one from scratch?

 

[tgibson]

Perhaps you could update your tutorial with the bounding box information, Sidney?

This light splash system is hard coded into FS9, using only the spotlight.bmp file. You edit that BMP file and it changes all taxi and landing lights too. However, Sidney has sent me one that he says works better for light poles and doesn't affect taxi or landing lights much (I haven't tried it yet).

So you can't "add" a similar system, although you can alter the way that your light splash looks in these light pole models by changing the light_land material settings (RGB and Opacity), so you can really customize them. Changing the angle of the light polygon will change the shape of the splash too.

Also, there are two other options:

1. Add a ground polygon to your light pole that sits just above the tarmac and texture it using your own custom light splash texture.

2. Use a "3D light cone" effect by creating a cone in GMAX and texturing that.

If using FSX you can also use Bill's technique given above that actually lights up other objects.

Hope this helps,

 

[sfrenchie]

I like #1, sounds easy enough. Now if I only could find a way to get rid of the white line around my ground polys.

#2 would be elegant if it was possible to have only the cone (in a complete light object) tweaked to face the aircraft at all times. That's beyond my capabilities.

 

[tgibson]

One more thing - I'm not sure if expanding the bounding box also increases the size of the crash box (Arno?), but if this is true you will need to make sure that Crash is turned off when you create this object. I do that by including the following in the makemdl.cfg file (if you don't have one, just create one in Notepad or Wordpad and place into the same folder as your makemdl.exe (mine is in GMAX/gamepacks/fs2004/plugins):

[Options]
Crash=0

If you already have an Options section just add it to that section. If you already have that line, make sure it's 0.

Oh, and one *more* thing - you can always get the Statistics box back in MDL Tweaker II by clicking the blue "i" icon, even if the menu choice is grayed out.

Hope this helps,

 

[Sidney Schwartz]

Perhaps you could update your tutorial with the bounding box information, Sidney?

Probably not, having so many other things to do. If someone else wants to update it, I can send it to them in MS Word or html format.

 

[Sidney Schwartz]

1. Add a ground polygon to your light pole that sits just above the tarmac and texture it using your own custom light splash texture.

That's what I did here. No real lights of any kind...it's all done with textures.

 

[tgibson]

One thing about the "circle of light technique" - if ground shadows are turned on you will have a circular shadow around the object during the day, unless you Tweak it to remove the shadow.

Note: Yes, I know this is an old thread, but I have been steadily linking to it due to questions on other forums.

Hope this helps,

 

[kevintampa5]

One thing about the "circle of light technique" - if ground shadows are turned on you will have a circular shadow around the object during the day, unless you Tweak it to remove the shadow.

Note: Yes, I know this is an old thread, but I have been steadily linking to it due to questions on other forums.

Hope this helps,

Man, don't wake the sleeping dead.

Seriously, its a good addition to the topic.