Simviation Forums

Hagar, I read your description, using 4 separate parts.  I suppose the transparent disks must be the same diameter as the prop circle.

Do you apply a transparent texture to these disks ?  The texture must then be black with a yellow border ?

Hi Ajver. I forget exactly what I told you now. See if this helps. It's a typical animated prop for Engine 1 as used on my own designs. They work well in CFS2 & FS2002.
The prop actually consists of only 2 different basic parts but each is duplicated making a total of 4 separate parts to give the full animated effect. I've moved them apart on the Z axis so you can see it more clearly.



prop0_blurred is a transparent disk with transparent texture applied to the front.
prop0_still is the 3D 4 bladed prop, visible when the engine is off.
prop0_slow is a duplicate copy of prop0_still with a different part name.
prop0_blurred.1 is a duplicate copy of prop0_blurred with flipped polys.

I've selected View/View Surface Normals so you can see the direction the polys are facing on the transparent disks.
The prop disks are simple 2D parts which can be viewed from one side only so the polys on prop0_blurred.1 are flipped to display from rear views.
(The transparent texture is applied to the front only of both disks & the texure assignment is not changed for the rear view. This is a lttle Hagar trick which looks good in the sim.)
The part names are important & selected from the "aircraft stock animation" part names list in FSDS2 Part Properties.

You can create your own transparent prop texture or use an existing one. These do not always look as you might expect. It would be a good idea to check out some you particularly like from existing designs to see how it's done. I must admit to "borrowing" other designers textures from time to time, with full permission & credit of course.

Here's how the finished prop displays in CFS2.

Thank you Hagar.  I have tried it, and it works well.  I am getting something similar to your picture.

I do have another question.
How can I get the prop to slow down so that you see the blades in idle ?  I know one could do this in Aircraft Animator.

I have also seen some aircraft where you get a blurred effect on the blades as it speeds up from idle, and then goes into the disk.  How is this done ?

work with the prop_anim_ratio in the cfg file to "slow down" the rotation....

as for the "intermediate" blurred effect, instead of cloning the prop0_still into prop0_slow, make a new set of textured disks (instead of a full disk, make it a pie-sectioned disk.

You may also get some ideas from Doc Blake's prop tutorial at the FFDS Tutorials Library...

Thank you Felix.
I will see what I can do, and thanks also for reminding me of the FFDS tutorial library.