Tail Stinger

[pavespawn]

Along these lines guys...  I am modifying the Rory Pave Low to better match the real acft.  As far as animations, I am only having one problem.  I need the tailstinger to go up when the gear does.  At the same time, I need the stinger to extend when the gear goes down but retract when there is weight on wheels.  How do I link these actions together?  Do I need to rename the tailstinger?  It is a tailhook right now.

[juri]

are you making this for fs2002 of fs9?

and is it ok for the tailstinger to come back down when you take off but gear is still down? actually, what is a tailstinger???

-juri

[Travis]

I would suggest this:

In Gmax, gear has a certain number of animation keyframes.  0-200, really.

0-100 is the extension of the gear.

101-200 is the compression of the gear when it sits on the ground.

So make the gear extend all the way (including the tailstinger) from 0-100 and then make the tailstinger compress all the way back in from 101-200.  This will ensure that the tailstinger (tailwheel?) will retract like you wanted when the aircraft settles on the ground, but when it is in the air the tailstinger will be extended.

Now comes the tricky part.  To get this animation to work, you're gonna need to fiddle with the contact points in the aircraft.cfg, which requires you to kinda know what you're doing.

I would go download the SDKs on Aircraft Creation from the MS site (link in my signature).  They will tell you everything you might want to know about the intricacies of the contact points section.

[juri]

if your choppers center (or actually any) gear lifts straight up when retracting, you could link your stinger to center gears lower part and animate a little extra movemets upwards starting from frame 101 till frame 200.

this way, when your center gear compresses, the stinger goes back into hiding.

in case your gears rotate out, you could still link the stinger to one of them, and try animating counter-rotation and downwards movement to frames 1-100, and then put some extra upwards movement from 101 to 200.

-juri

[pavespawn]

Hey Guys,

Thanks a lot for the help.

[pavespawn]

Hey Guys,

Just wanted to give a bit of an update on my Pave project.  I have managed to get the stinger to do what I want and this is how I did it.  I set the animation so the stinger extends to 100 and then retracts to 200 as previously recomended.  Then I renamed all the parts of the stinger to r_gear_XX where xx is sequential numbers.  Now FS thinks that the stinger is a gear.  I did the same thing with my tail scanner on the ramp.  I renamed him door_passenger_xx and he now moves with the ramp.  I was afraid that there was going to be a lot more to it than that but it worked out great (and it only took me a week to figure it out)!  This is probably old hat to you veterans but hopefully it will help fellow newbies like me.

[juri]

that is good to hear!

how about animating the tail scanner so that he walks to the ramp...

-juri

[Travis]

Just so you know, anything that is linked to a part (such as the tailgear) will move along with that part.  If you animate it to retract and then disappear (like with the gear bays) the parts that are linked to it will disappear as well.  So if you want to cut down on the polygons in a model, you could link it to parts that disappear when they aren't seen.

This cuts down on polys, and it makes the model easier to render when it displays in FS, so you get better framerates.

[Gnome]

The vanishing parts tip is a good 'un.  :-)


Kev