"applied scale" question

[jimski]

Am trying modeling for the first time after a few years of flying simulators. I have downloaded Starry's unfinished  Whitley gmax bomber and would like to fly it in CFS2. (Is there an sdk pack available for cfs2?)

I have downloaded the fs2004 sdk packs and the gmax packs and the middleman. Tried getting an mdl file by exporting from gmax but no go so far. I have gotten past all the gripes except for several of the form:

"node gear01 has scale applied, remove before exporting"

Actually there are about six such gripes, all related to the retractable gear. So far I haven't found out what "scale" it is talking about. Any clues? I also downloaded the gmax tutorial but haven't found the right "scale" yet.

Jimski

[Felix/FFDS]

with the part gear01 selected, go to the hierarchy tab, scroll down and then click on "reset scale".

[Moach]

also, make sure, that when you reset scale, your animation slider is set to zero, and be careful when reseting on linked parts (always go from child to parent, or else bad things happen to your animations )


c ya

Moach

[jimski]

I did the scale reset and the exporter sent it on with no gripes. However the resulting x file was only a few letters long and makemdl complained of an invalid x file.

Have this feeling I'm in way over my head. Need to review these forums more and the tutorial. The Whitley gmax model itself looks to be complete.

Thanks for the help.

Jimski

[Gnome]

I have found that if I reboot the machine before exporting I can usually avoid the invalid X file problem.  GMAX is a bit of a memory messer-upper, it seems.

Export Selected seems to work better too.


Kev

[jimski]

Tried that with no luck. One thing I might mention is that middleman tells me something like "no interior views found" and I assumed that might be about a virual cockpit. And that it would not stop exporting properly. Is that correct?

JImski

[Gnome]

No, it just means that there is no VC (no group named "interior").

When things get really bad and I can't see what the problem is I start leaving out bits, the most recent parts first and keep trying to export the model until I find the bad part.

Kev

[jimski]

Don't know if I remove bits in order since I was trying to adopt the Whitley from the adoption page.

Brings up another question, though. I know from reading the old forum postings that I am not the only one who has an export problem. Is there a small and well proven gmax file available for download to test all the software hoops one must go through in going from a good gmax file to a good mdl file?

Jimski