Cross section blueprints in FSDS

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How to see your fuselage in profile

I am grateful to Felix FFDS on FlightSim.com for this tip!

When studying blueprints, you might see that it give you profiles for the fuselage at key points, so that you can shape it correctly. Look on these blueprints of a Eurofighter for an example. To get these profiles in the correct place in Flight Sim design studio, read on...

As said, this was Felix FFDS's idea, so this is how he explains it:


It appears that you can map a transparent cross section polygon - sort of.

On a whim I made a square texture - just a basic outline shape - a star - and set it to black background and applied it to a square polygon.

In the texture definition, I left the fallback color 255,255,255 and alpha=0.

Image:Textrans.jpg

Polygon material properties are default, except for alpha=0

Image:Matfortrans.jpg


The result is a transparent background polygon, with a white outlined "cross section". Okay, only visible in the 3D window, but we already know how to bend, fold, spindle and mutilate vertices just by looking at the preview window, right?

Image:Resultfortrans.jpg


So, in conclusion:

  • Get the cross-sections and make small textures with them.
  • Make transparent, textured polygons in the correct place.
  • Model according to what you see in the 3d view.

I hope this was useful to you, and thanks again to FelixFFDS on FlightSim.com.

--Flying Officer Jevans 15:45, 4 April 2008 (EDT)

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