"Reactor" <rea### [at] hotmailcom> wrote:
>
> Very nice!  I, too, am working on some aircraft, both for animations and for the
> POV-ray Object Collection.  I am not using csg/isosurfaces, but mostly meshes
> produced in Wings3D, as I find that easy to work with.  Of course, when dealing
> with meshes, you have to worry about mesh resolution and files sizes and such,
> but they render much more quickly. *shrug* there is always a trade off.
>
> I've gotten the body shape done on mine, but at some point I need to do the
> landing gear, as well as the interior and pilot.  However, instead of
> continuing on that model, I find myself working on a new, VTOL model...
>
> Out of curiosity, are you going to add control surfaces?  Also, how will you
> place your craft?  I was going to use the spline_trans macro, but it doesn't
> provide enough info directly, so I think I am going to have to partially
> re-write it.
>
>
> -Reactor

It's good to know someone else takes interest in jets as much as I do. :)  To
answer your questions, I do intend to add control surfaces, landing gear,
weapons, a fully automatable cockpit, and a pilot.  This project will take
quite a while but I imagine it will be worth it.  I've already developed a way
to do the flight path animation.  I used 2 spline to do this.  One spline is
used to adjust the jet's roll while the second spline is for actually moving
the jet.  I used the Reorient_Trans with the direction my jet normally faces
(before moving it or rotating it) and a rough approximation of the derivative
of the spline at the current point in time.  The reason I used this instead of
the spline_trans is because I had to move the smoke trail in a way not possible
with the spline_trans macro.  The spline_macro should work great if you are just
moving the jet.  Even if you wanted a lot of control on the banking you could
use the spline_trans with no banking and use a separate spline to roll, similar
to what I did.

I can understand why you're making the aircraft as meshes.  If I was much better
at mesh modeling I would too.  They`d certainly make longer animations more
possible because they are so fast to render.  Something that may interest you
is that half the rendering time was spent on the smoke trail because of the
high max trace level I had to use to remove artifacts and the amount of media
the smoke uses.

Bridgeofstraws

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