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Old 19th January 2006, 03:35 AM   #1
Michael Wilson
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Default a tip for rendering the exterior of cockpit windows

i wanted to give a tip for rendering the front windows on 3d cockpits on ac3d. some people have run into difficutly getting the exterior obj windows to merge nicely with the xplane 'acf' fuselage.. a great solution to this can be seen on the way benedict stratman does the windows on his 737. it solves a bunch of problems plus it completely eliminates any jaggies on the window frames.

my 707 exterior windows obj file uses the same trick as benedicts 737 except that i have allowed for window frames to show up between the cockpit windows by separating the cockpit windows into separate windows. and that elimates all the fuselage to obj connecting problems, and also eliminates all jaggies on windows and window frames.
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Old 27th August 2006, 09:16 AM   #2
Michael Wilson
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Default Re: a tip for rendering the exterior of cockpit windows

i now have a freeware example of this, the armagnac:

http://www.forjets.netfirms.com/page21.html

rendering the windows this way is called translucency as opposed to transparency (ben supnik says make sure you use the right word to avoid confusion.)

the deal is that by placing the glass part of the cockpit_out object at the bottom of the hierarchy it causes the glass to look through the fuselage and show the inside of the cockpit object, and you dont need to paint the windows on the plane.

***very important the glass parts of the window needs to be separated from the rest of the cockpit and merged so the glass is all one piece, which is then placed at the bottom of the hierarchy, in the hierarchy view thingy.

this saves a lot of time and looks great with no pixelated jaggies no matter how close you zoom up to the plane.

once you get good at using ac3d its faster to render windows this way than to paint them on the paint image, since painting windows the correct shape can be difficult with the way xplane wraps paint images around the fusleage/nose.

the only drawback with this "translucency" method is that at certain angles if you look closely you can see that the surface of the glass sticks out a tiny bit in front of the fuselage surface. but i dont really mind this considering the other advantages.

so now people can see an example of this with the armagnac. ive used the same method to render the cockpit windows on my tristar, 707, and other planes.

ive released armagnac as temporarily freeware until i have time to put more detail in the cockpit cause im busy with other projects. also because i want people to be able to enjoy mike istas awesome paintwork since he put a lot of work into this.

Last edited by Michael Wilson; 27th August 2006 at 09:33 AM.
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