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Adding new planes (Games : Vector Thrust : Forum : Mod Support : Adding new planes) Locked
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Jul 9 2012 Anchor

OK, so this is my first post in the forum.

I've been messing with the files since the very moment I got the game, and I'm really pleased with how easy it is to edit everything.

Currently I managed to import a plane model from a friend of mine into the game using the Easy Ogre Exporter for 3DS Max 2012. Here are some pics of it:

Img.photobucket.com
Img.photobucket.com
Img.photobucket.com

As you can see it looks "perfect", there are a few textures missing or wrong but that's because of how the model was made, the import to Vector Thrust was flawless in itself.

However, during the whole process, I ran into one particular problem, the .skeleton file, I can't seem to understand how to actually make a new one. For now I'm using the one from the original plane (Su-47), so for now the new plane has no animations, I know I have to create "nodes" for the missle positions, the aileron positions and for the thrust position, I tried using a dummy as node to position the thrust and just now a single bone, but it ended up crashing the game.

So, what I need to know is this:
1) How exactly is the .skeleton made?
2) How are the animations made?
3) How are the nodes supposed to be named?

I think I may not be able to go further without an explanation on those, so I hope you can help me timeSymmetry.:confused:

Jul 9 2012 Anchor

The aircraft looks really good!
1) The “.skeleton” file is created automatically if a model has any animation.
2) How to add an animation:

I recommend using the top view.
Place the model in the position [0 0 0]


Add the main bone in the position [0 0 0]


Place the bones for all moving parts


Select all the bones, exploding the main, and link them to the main


Select the aircraft and select skin


Add all the bones


Set up the bones, selecting them individually a press the button [R]


Now go back to the plane and select a control surface to skin, and hiding everything else (how do you do this, depends how the aircraft is modeled)


Select the bone that will control that surface and then select the respective vertices. After selecting them, set the [Abs. Effect] to 1
Repeat the process for all moving parts.


Go back to selecting each bone and animate them the way you like (don’t forget to set the auto key on)

These are the most important steps, after this it deepens on which exporter you are using. In the vector thrust development is being used an old version of the OgreMax. Currently the ogreMax is commercial, but they have available a non-commercial version to download, it has some limitations, but they may not be really an issue for you.

If you use this one, I can help you in more detail, but there are plenty of exporters out there, you and try to find the exporter that is easier for you to work with:

3) There isn’t any special rule in naming nodes, but some tips in setting up the parameters:
For sub weapon:
[Weapons]
...
SubWeapPos= "-1.076 0.264 -2.838"
SubWeapDirVector = "0 0.00 -1"

To find the exact position, place a dummy near the model and copy the position values.

Very important! If your using 3d max there is some covertion in coordinates.
[X,Y,Z] -> in the game become [X,Z,-Y]
Like for example [-1.076 2.838 0.264] become [-1.076 0.264 -2.838]

For the engine:
If you ar not using a skeleton set Engine_#_BoneAttach to false
Also if the plane’s engines are not attached to any bone, change the afterburner reactor to:
[Reactors]
AfterBurner_Reactor = “AfterBrn”
For the vortice:
Is similar to the gun.

Place a dummy near the model and copy the values.

This is just a quick overview, if you need any section to be explained in more detail, just ask.

Jul 9 2012 Anchor

Awesome explanation! Exactly what I needed! Thanks! Now I'll see if I can finish then convertion...

However, I'd like to know one thing about materials, is it possible to change the color of the glass material to yellow? In the original model the glass is yellow, so I'd like to keep it that way. If not, then could you add a yellow glass material in the next update?

Ah! I'd like to know one extra thing, is it possible for the plane to have more than the skin texture? Because this one has a few separate textures, like the pilot and cockpit one. Mixing them all in one file would be a pain...

UPDATE:

Ok, I made the bones, animated them, tagged the animations as AnPitch, AnRoll, AnYaw and AnBrake, got the coordinates for the weapons and stuff, ok... but... it failed. The plane appeared in the selection screen as usual, but when I started a match the game crashed with an error saying that the animation "AnVelSt1" couldn't be found, I went to the .ini and found an entry about that close to the end of the .ini, I have no idea what's that supposed to be, so I turned the option to 0 and tried loading a match again, this time the game crashed but didn't give any error, just a crash, after that I made various attempts to change the things in the .ini in hopes that it may have been a text mistake but no dice, the game just keeps crashing, so this means I can only have fucked it up in the .skeleton file, that is, the animations. I won't lie, this is the first time I make animations in Max, so the chance that something went severely wrong during the process is high.

Short version: I screwed up somewhere during the animation process and I don't know what! So I have a few more questions, timeSimmetry:

1) What exactly is your process to animate a bone in Max? I mean, the whole keyframe part and making different animations. I probably made some fatal mistake during the animation process, so I'd like to know what exactly you do to get it to work ingame
2) What are the AnVelSt1 and AnVelSt1 animations? I turned them off in the Su-47 and didn't really notice any difference so I'm at a loss there...

Well, that's all for now I guess, I'm 100% stuck now... :(

UPDATE 2:

After ungodly hours hitting my head on walls trying to figure out why my animations were crashing the game I finally found out why.

Turns out, Vector Thrust animations only need...... 2 keyframes... I was using 3 keyframes in my animations, one for each oposite movement and one as the middle, but the one in the middle is actually not needed since the game leaves each animation in it's middle by default. So ehh... such an easy mistake...

OK, now I can move on to the next steps... :dead:

Jul 11 2012 Anchor

My miss, I should have explained better the assumptions the game makes with the animations.
But let’s start from the beginning:
-You don’t necessarily have to call the animations by “AnPitch, AnRoll, AnYaw or AnBrake”
- AnVelSt1 is for animations that varies with the velocity, it is useful for variable sweep wings or flaps (for the su-47 it also it is used for the small parts in the top of the body)
-As for the standard key frames hat are used:

For yaw:
X -> key frame turning left
x+5 -> key frame in center
x+10-> key frame turning right

For pitch:
X -> key frame pitching up
x+8 -> key frame in center
x+16-> key frame pitching down

For Roll:
X -> key frame roll left
x+8-> key frame in center
x+16-> key frame roll right

For Brake:
X -> key frame default
x+10-> key frame max brake

For Acceleration:
X -> key frame default
x+10-> key frame max accel

For Velocity state:
X -> key frame default
x+10-> key frame state active

Jul 12 2012 Anchor

Thanks timeSymmetry! That helped, now I managed to finish the mod!

Here is a video if it:

And here are various pics of the final version:

Smg.photobucket.com

Man... making this mod was an intense odyssey, mainly because of the absurd amount of errors, problems, and things that I simply didn't know how to do because this is the first real mod for this game, but I'm SO SATISFIED by the result that I think it was all worth it in the end, and I'm ready to make more mods!

About this one, dunno if it will be available to the public since the aircraft is from my friend, Venom, so he should decide what to become of this.

Edited by: XN-Sigma

Jul 12 2012 Anchor

Awesome!It looks perfect! Really well done! :thumbup: :thumbup: :thumbup: :thumbup: :thumbup:
I’m also very interested to hear your feedback about the modding of the game.There is anything that you like to be changed/improved?Your opinion will be very useful in enhancing the modding capabilities of the game.
(Also it was added a Showcase in the forum in case anyone wants to show their works)

Jul 12 2012 Anchor

Well as I said, making this mod was some intense work, because I had to deal with things I didn't know about, exporting a mesh into the game is fairly simple, you just use the Ogre exporter and that's it, but making it fully work was quite the challenge. I can't really remember all the little problems I had, but most of them were because I did something wrong because it was my first time doing it. The most problems I had were because of the animations, I spent entire days trying to figure out how to make the animations RIGHT in Max, then you made your first post in this thread and it helped me understand how to do the animations but I was still having problems, and only after your second post about the animations that I finally understood the right way to do them. You see, remember that I said I had to use 2 keyframes to make it work, because 3 keyframes was making the game crash? Well, turns out, what needed to be 2 only was not the keyframes, but the nametags, you have a whole animation sequence and you put a nametag at the start and one at the end linked to the start one. The other BIG problem I had was setting up the size of the aircraft, but this one was because I made a FATAL mistake in Max, I spent hours upon hours trying to get the size of the aircraft to fit right ingame, and for "some reason" the proportions between the real dimensions of the aircraft and the world units were all fucked up, and I just couldn't understand why, THEN I finally noticed that I couldn't resize the model to the right scale because it had bones attached to it, once I deleted the bones I managed to reset the xforn and put the units in meters, so lesson learned, NEVER do the animations before all else is done.

Overall it was a great experience to make this mod, I have a history of making mods for racing games, but with them you had to use "underground" tools and stuff, you had to do a lot of "hacking" to make them work, but now doing this mod, it actually felt "easy", sure I got frustrated several times but I still managed to find my way out of problems. The hardest part was the animation process, certainly, but only because I didn't know how to do it.

Oh yeah, I fixed the tail flaps movement, they were reversed, also made the rotor inside the engine work too, so basicly I added almost every possible effect to the aircraft, the only 2 things left were the cockpit and the speed animation that you mentioned, but this jet doesn't support that :P

So, now that I know how to add playable aircrafts to this game, it will be MUCH easier to do it again than this first time.

Jul 12 2012 Anchor

I still haven't really learned all the tools in Max. Your screenshots look like they're in max 8, what tools do you use in your workflow?

Edit: Sigma, you said on youtube you were able to animate the engine rotor. How did you do it and is it actually linked to the throttle?

Edit: Speed animation? Does that mean variable geometry?

Edited by: bornloser

Jul 14 2012 Anchor

bornloser wrote: Sigma, you said on youtube you were able to animate the engine rotor. How did you do it and is it actually linked to the throttle?

When I was playing with the A-10 I noticed it's rotors were moving and they adjusted the speed depending on how fast you were going so I decided to take a look at it's ini file to see what was there, and found this section:

[Anims]
VelLoopAnim= "AnVelLoop"
VelLoopAnim_Keys = "0 100 200 300"
VelLoopAnim_Values = "0 2 6 14"

"VelLoop", I assumed it meant "velocity loop" and by that I assumed it was an animation that keeps looping forever, so in my max file I made a new animation called AnVelLoop (I know I don't need to name them the same but I like to keep a convention), in this animation I added 5 keyframes, the first stoped, and each subsequent ones rotated 90º in relation to the one that came before, so by the 5th keyframe you have the exact same position as the first.

1st = 0º (default position "up")
2nd = 90º (rotated right/left)
3rd = 180º (rotated down)
4th = 270º (rotated -right/-left)
5th = 360º (default position "up" again)

IMPORTANT! You HAVE to actually rotate the mesh to those precise degrees, for example, if you just copy the default position (0º) to the 360º position the animation will rotate backwards because it will assume you want to rotate it from 270º back to 0º.

bornloser wrote: Speed animation? Does that mean variable geometry?

Yeah, by speed animation I mean the animation when a part of the aircraft changes when reaching a certain speed. For example the wings of an F-14. Since my friend's fighter has none of that I didn't need it. The section about that is this:

NumSpeedStates=2

SpeedStates_1_Name="AnVelSt1"
SpeedStates_1_SpeedValues="0 0 170 200"
SpeedStates_1_IsInterpol= "false"

SpeedStates_2_Name="AnVelSt2"
SpeedStates_2_SpeedValues="0 0 60 70"
SpeedStates_2_IsInterpol= "true"

As you can see it has 2 states that go from a certain speed to another. Hope it helps.

Jul 29 2012 Anchor

So what it the most precise way to rotate the flight surfaces (Edit: looks like you can angle bones so that their roll is perpendicular to the desired axis of rotation, then rotate locally)? On most planes the community is likely to create the wings are going to be swept and the control surfaces won't be connected at the exact center, so I'll have to be able to make them pivot at an awkward angle. What was your workflow for isolating the vertices and animating them properly?

Sigma, you said you were using easy ogre exporter, right? Well I have that loaded but I cn't figure out how to export my model as a .mesh instead of a .scene. Also, how did you set up your materials?

Edited by: bornloser

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