Hi, I've been doing this game thing for ages, and for the life of me I have been unable to get a model into flight gear from my usual 3DS Max.Has anyone else had any luck? If so how?I have tried so far using the M$ tools from FS2004 to generate an mdl file. I have tried vrml files. I have not tried DXF files, but they do not carry UVW mapping coords, and therefore do not interest me at all.Any help out there? I would like to start making plane models for flight gear, but so far can't.To get this out of the way, I am not going to start using AC3D, nor am I going to switch to linux to do the modeling. I am trained in 3DS Max, and I have been using it for several years (since 1997), so I intend to keep using it. I am using Version 5 if it helps anyone.And finally, apologies to anyone I may offend with my first post here, I am just frustrated. I have a Rutan VariEZ inspired model I want to get into flight gear, and its driving me nuts. Hell, if I get this figured out, I will post a how-to for people, and try to get it into the docs.Thanks for any help in advance.

>Hi, I've been doing this game thing for ages, and for the>life of me I have been unable to get a model into flight gear>from my usual 3DS Max.>>Has anyone else had any luck? If so how?Because Flightgear uses the Plib library for 3d model file loadingit should be possible to load .3ds files and 3DSMAX ASCII files directly with flightgear.If that does not work you could still convert your 3ds Max filesto *.ac files with a file converter tool or export them in 3ds Max (if possible) to *.ac.If you can't do that or don't have such a file converteryou could AFAIK use Blender to import your 3ds files andthen export them to *.ac with Blender.These scripts should be helpfull to import 3ds files in Blender.http://bane.servebeer.com/programming/blender/You could also take a look at these pages they could be IMHO very helpfull for your problem: http://www.flightgear.org/Docs/fgfs-model-howto.htmlhttp://www.seedwiki.com/page.cfm?doc=Model...418&wpid=123390I also suggest to subscribe to the flightgear-devel mailinglist because there are more flightgear developers that could help youthan in this forum:http://www.flightgear.org/mail.html

You should be able to load .3DS models into FG = the first ones I did were in this format but as I was exporting them from Realsoft3D I was unable to texture them I could only export the geometry. Since then I've switched to exporting the geometry in .OBJ format and then importing it into AC3D to apply the textures and convert it into .AC format.However, I believe someone is currently working on an MD11 using Max and has also been able to texture it in .3DS format so you should be able to get it working.

.3ds works, thanks guys. Now I just need to figure out why the front end tool sees it, displays, and then the actual simulator crashes with a "can't find runway 28" error.. whatever that means. If you're curious, changing the plane only, makes this error go away. So its my model for certain, just not sure why.

The "can't find runway 28" error shouldn't be causing the crash - that's normal if that runway doesn't exist at the airfield you're using and FG will assign another runway to take off from.How are you loading your .3DS model into FG?What I'm thinking is that you may have taken one of the existing model.xml files and changed the model path so that it points to your model instead of the original one. The trouble with doing this is that if the model.xml file includes animation stuff and it refers to an object name that doesn't exist in your model you will then get a crash. It should also be noted that the plib model loader doesn't like objects that consist of a single poly, so if you have an object that's just made out of a single rectangle you'll have to sub-divide it into two triangles.If you're running FG from the command line you could try adding --log-level=warn to the parameter list. This should indicate if the problem is due to the animation model.xml file referring to a non-existant object.If this is the case then you could try removing or commenting out all the animation stuff in the model.xml file so that it only includes the path to the model.

The animation stuff is almost certainly my problem. I just assumed the engine would return some warnings, and keep going. Well then, we all know what they say about people who assume things.. ;)

Ok, so it wasn't the animations.. I have no idea. I am going to try to make the xml files all from scratch, and see if that does it.

You could try using the model file from the beech99 - that doesn't include any animation stuff, just the path to the model and some offsets to position it correctly. The full path name of the file is:$FG_ROOT/Aircraft/beech99/Models/beech99-model.xmlfor initial testing you could simply try changing that beech99-model.xml file to point to your model, instead of the beech99 model, and then try starting FG with the beech99.If all goes well you should see your model.