External View zoom issues

[cwchute]

Hi,

I'm running the latest patched Orbiter. When I try to zoom in on my ship in external view, at a certain distance (which seems to vary from ship to ship), the ship begins to disappear, beginning with the outer hull (revealing the interior), and then altogether as I zoom in closer.

Any thoughts/suggestions?

Thanks in advance.

Chris

 

[FordPrefect]

Howdy,

this is a normal effect. You even have this in e.g. FS9. It depends on the near-plane clipping calculation. In O2006P1 I believe it is at 2.5 meters in external view and 10 cm in the virtual cockpit. However, as you mentioned the distance varies among the different meshes.
AFAIR, it also depends on the attributes and/or scale of the mesh before being exported to *.msh format and the settings in the mesh config or vessel configuration files, like Objectsize or something like that. Maybe any of the more experienced 3d modelers among the Orbiter community want to share more details about that, please feel free to do so, it would be a valuable info for the add-on dev forum.

 

[cwchute]

Thank you FordP. It is a bit like unpeeling and re-peeling an onion as I zoom on and out. I was hoping I could remedy this by tweaking the settings somehow......... maybe shorten the distance that the peeling/un-peeling occurs if not fix it altogether. Often, it stops so far away from the ship as to make the external view irrelevant.

 

[Xantcha]

Actually you are not zooming but moving a camera, so if you like to see fine details of craft try to get a distance where no clipping occurs, then set fov to 10 (and move camera awy if it will be too much of the zoom).

Also clipping distance depends on ship size (not the size of mesh but the attribute of vessel). If you will set small size for somehting big - a lot of clipping enxues (not sure why so - before I encountered this I was thinking exactly opposite to be true)