Simviation Forums

Hi Guys,
            Is there any other tutorials beside fsds help files regardind udercarriage or maybe someone can give some breif detail of what is required to make  to make your landing gear retract and extend.

                      Thanks

In the simplest form - one straight main strut to which the tire is attached:

tag your main strut, say l_gear.  adjust the axis so that the axis is at the point around which you want your gear to rotate.

MAke your tire part - l_tire a child of l_gear, placing it at the "bottom" of l_gear.

Select l_gear as your current part.

Go into animation mode (Shift-F5)

Your gear down is at keyframe=0.  Set your first keyframe at keyf=0 (Animation->Set key Frame)

go to keyframe 100 either press "n" 100 times, or Shift-n 10 times)

rotate l_gear 90 degrees (Transformation->Rotate then on the z-axis type "90", click on whole part).  OR on parts Properties, type 90 in the Zaxis rotation box.

Set keyframe.

Note that visually you should also have seen l_tire "following" the animation.

Get out of animation mode, save, and spawn the model - hopefully you have an animated l_gear.

Hi Felix,
           thanks for your advise I am sure it is right but somehow I still cant get it right. the gear simply will not retract doesnt matter what I do it is frusatrating.
            any other suggestions?

Skyhawk. Just a thought. Make sure you based your project on an aircraft with retracting gear. This is defined in the Aircraft.cfg [contact_points] entries. This example is from the default Baron. The entries in red define the extension & retraction times in seconds. If the values are 0 or 0.0 the gear is fixed & will not retract.

[contact_points]
//GEAR
point.0=1,

Hi Hagar
            That is the exact aircraft I have based my project on and the extension and retraction times are ok. im using FSDSv2 and as far as I know it has a built in animator is that right? so once you tag your parts it should get it right.Gear down keyframe should  be 0 and gear up =90  well I noticed  its the opposite WAY ROUND  in my project how do I get it right?

gear DOWN is keyframe 100 (or before)

gear UP is keyframe 0 (or a bit later)


What the keyframes mean is that from time tick (keyframe 0 to keyframe 100 will take 3 seconds.  If you set your first keyframe (gear up) at keyframe 33 and it's extended completely by keyframe 66, the visual sequence takes only 1 sec ... this way you can animate gear doors,etc within the 100 frames.

open doors - keframes 0-33
gear extends keyframes 33-66
doors close - keyframes 66-100

[quote]
Hi Hagar