General Question Velcro: Does it work?

[Astro SG Wise]

Ok. I might use Anim8or. Still need to learn how. The more I work on it, the more ideas I have, and the harder it becomes.

 

[Donamy]

Ok. I might use Anim8or. Still need to learn how. The more I work on it, the more ideas I have, and the harder it becomes.

Welcome to Orbiter addon developing. :tiphat:

 

[Cras]

In short, velcro is an epic add-on, and well worth your time learning how to use. my 2 cents

 

[Pipcard]

Velcro is indeed awesome. What would make it better:
- a roll program for the autopilot when you press "o" (instead it tries to yaw to the target azimuth)
- custom exhaust/particles (so you can have better quality)

 

[Interceptor]

Velcro is indeed awesome. What would make it better:
- a roll program for the autopilot when you press "o" (instead it tries to yaw to the target azimuth)
- custom exhaust/particles (so you can have better quality)

Also it would be nice if it dropped the ET tank correctly too.

 

[Astro SG Wise]

So, is Anim8or a good program to use?

 

[BruceJohnJennerLawso]

So, is Anim8or a good program to use?

As said before

Both Anim8or and Blender are free software, a quick google search will give you the links. Blender is all round a much superior software, but Anim8or is still a somewhat handy tool to use, only a few megs in size for just the executable, so it fits quite nicely on a memory stick. The texture mapping process for it is quite clunky though.

 

[Cras]

Dont use the velcro's launch autopilot, its not worth it. Use Launch MFD instead, far far far far far better.

 

[Pipcard]

from the Launch MFD description: "(SSTO and 2-stage only)"

Does it take into account third stages? Or boosters?

 

[Donamy]

UAP is also great !!!

 

[Astro SG Wise]

So, a more specific quesiton. Many art studios can "fill" similar color areas. In a mesh editor like Anim8or, can you take a solid color and make it a different one with just one click? I have no Orbiter programing experience, so I wouldn't know.

 

[Cras]

Launch MFD is better than UAP.

And as far as boosters, and staging goes for Launch MFD, you can program a preplanned pitch program that covers the booster segment, so you will be in the right attitude for booster cutoff, and then let the PID autopilot take over from there, or you can preprogram the pitch for the entire ride if you want.

---------- Post added at 09:58 PM ---------- Previous post was at 09:56 PM ----------

The only beef with Velcro I have is that there is always this significant amount of dV attached to spent stages, so like, when you drop an ET, you will be thrown forward from it instead of just gentle floating away from it, a strange thing I havent found a way to work around.

 

[Astro SG Wise]

Working on a rough draft EFT-1.

 

[gattispilot]

email/message me if you need help

You can use Anim8or to make a mesh and then convert to orbiter. With meshwizard though you can edit the colors of a material

 

[Astro SG Wise]

Is meshwizard free?

 

[BruceJohnJennerLawso]

Is meshwizard free?

Yes, its an Orbiter-specific program made for editing Orbiters mesh files, found on Orbithangar mods. Its a tiny bit hard to set up (needs an external dll, IIRC?) but a very handy tool for Orbiter development.

found here:

[ame="http://orbithangar.com/searchid.php?ID=2740"]http://orbithangar.com/searchid.php?ID=2740[/ame]

---------- Post added at 17:53 ---------- Previous post was at 17:19 ----------

So, a more specific quesiton. Many art studios can "fill" similar color areas. In a mesh editor like Anim8or, can you take a solid color and make it a different one with just one click? I have no Orbiter programing experience, so I wouldn't know.

In Anim8or (and in most 3d modelling software I think) the basic idea is that you create untextured simple meshes from scratch (cubes, cylinders, etc), resize, reshape them, & whatnot, then apply a material to them. Materials can either map textures to the surface of a mesh, or just a simple colour, along with some other optical parameters (basically how shiny it is, I think).

Meshes can be coloured just with materials, which is generally better performance wise, but is still somewhat limited, since creating a complex texture from materials can require a ridiculous number of individually coloured meshes, if the texture is quite complex.

(ie, if you wanted to add an american flag, the texture method would just involve mapping a single image to a cube, whereas the individual materials method would require you to create 50 stars (100 for both sides!!!), place them all in the right spots, along with individual meshes for the bars, colour each one individually... AAHHHH! The number of polys for such a simple task would be excessive)

Also may be of future use, IIRC, the key performance difference between D3D9 client and the old D3D7 graphics was that D3D9 handles textures more efficiently than D3D7 does, which worked better performance wise, since most developers prefer to texture their models, instead of using materials, but its actually slower with higher poly counts, since the nice graphics stuff that D3D9 requires more calculations per poly to do. So long story short, better performance in D3D9 involves emphasizing low poly counts over smaller textures.

 

[Astro SG Wise]

I tried to use meshwizard, but it said I was missing a .dll

 

[gattispilot]

Which one?
If you are just going to place the Orion where you want using Velcro then you don't need meshwizard.

 

[Astro SG Wise]

Which one?
If you are just going to place the Orion where you want using Velcro then you don't need meshwizard.

No, of course not. I want, with francis drake's permission, to change the white in the Orion into black, or the same shade of black as the drogue cover. Then, it would be more accurate to match EFT-1. Otherwise, I wouldn't need to change anything (except maybe deleting the solar panels). Also, I have been playing around with your fairing combination. Is there a way that it could all come off the second stage? That would be nice. I couldn't get it to do that.

 

[gattispilot]

Maybe email me what you need/want and I might be able to whip something out.
[email protected]