"Bridgeofstraws" <bri### [at] inboxcom> wrote:

> 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

That sounds pretty similar to what I've been looking at in terms of movement.  I
wanted to take it a step further by making the control surface orient themselves
and making vapor trails appear at the right times (by computing curvature &
speed, then placing media containers if the path curvature falls within a
certain range).
I've already cut up and parametrized the control surfaces so that they can be
animated by supplying a value in the range [-1,1], but I haven't done the
landing gear yet, which will be slightly more complex, but not significantly
so.  One issue that I have encountered is the loose tie between frames and real
world time.  I want things like the aircraft navigation lights to flash at a
specific real-world interval, but some scenes may require additional frames for
motion blur averaging.

What are you doing for the engines?  I started by using an emission media, but I
wasn't satisfied with the appearance.  I am considering using a partially
transparent textured cone (or more than one).
Also, if you are still considering a mesh-based approach, I may be able to help
if you are using Wings.

-Reactor

P.S. Attached is an untextured view of the model in progress. The mesh file is
about 1.4 MB, stats on a P4 3.0GHz (single core):
Peak memory used:          35522439 bytes
Total Scene Processing Times
  Parse Time:    0 hours  0 minutes  0 seconds (0 seconds)
  Photon Time:   0 hours  0 minutes  0 seconds (0 seconds)
  Render Time:   0 hours  5 minutes 32 seconds (332 seconds)
  Total Time:    0 hours  5 minutes 32 seconds (332 seconds)
CPU time used: kernel 10.88 seconds, user 313.52 seconds, total 324.39 seconds
Render averaged 1109.77 PPS over 360000 pixels

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