Simviation Forums

I tried converting my FSDS project to Autocad, and then to Gmax, but somewhere along the way, I lost the interior fuselage of the aircraft.  Is there any way I could have prevented this?  Both pieces of fuselage had been joined, and both showed up in Autocad.  Also, the exterior pieces I added in the same manner as the interior are still there.  What gives?

Also, may I suggest the method of converting between the two be added to the faq at the beginning of the forum?

DPR, I know I will get some fire for my response and it will certainly not help at all,
but I have yet to see a lossless FSDS2Gmax conversion.
For me it's not worth the hassle.
My suggestion is, scrap FSDS entirely and stay in Gmax all the way as it's lightyears ahead in it's capabilities.
I was thinking to suggest this when I saw your firsrt picks of your cockpit cutaway.
You can do that much better in Gmax using a boolean operation rather than going the quite annoying delete_poly_and_move_point box-modelling technic that FSDS can offer.
you have many more tools for instance to keep your symmetry, to avoid these smoothing errors in the cutaway in first place, errors which are typical for many FSDS designs btw.
Check out the tutorials section and forum over at http://www.freeflightdesign.com/
Lot of great info and helpfull people over there.

Why would you go to Autocad then into gmax?

With the CVA converter, you can convert your fsds source file (or just some parts) to dxf, which you can import into gmax 1.2 directly.

PS:  rather than a boolean to cut out the cockpit opening, I would suggest a shape merge - less messy (I think)

[quote]Why would you go to Autocad then into gmax?

With the CVA converter, you can convert your fsds source file (or just some parts) to dxf, which you can import into gmax 1.2 directly.

PS:

Hey, I'm winging it here...    BTW, I plan on getting into Gmax in the future.  Right now I just want to get something off of the drawing boards and into the air.