General Creation Questions About FSX

[Guest Mike Truly]

Martin,Thanks very much for the detailed write-up. I apologize for the lenght of this.Your second example is probably closest to what I need. But at this point, it's critical to understand the differences in approach between something like a flight simulator and an animation.In FSX (I'm learning) the possibilities are endless for proper sycronization and operation of various components (if they're programmed to operate correctly). I am very entrigued with the capabilities (and potentials) I see and amazed all that I've seen done in this market segment.With an animation, I can do all the same things and get the same visual end result (which is what I need to deliver... an animation of a flight). But since an animation app is a general app, I must create everything and animate everything and syncronize everything to get the animation working properly.(**I should note here that an animation can get far better visual results as it is not constrained by the real-time nature of a simulator and rendering and effects tricks can make anything visually possible. That having been said, the visual qualities of FSX are very close to acceptable for my needs and that's why I'm exploring the possibilities with it).For flight animations, it would seem that a flight simulator (like FSX) is very well suited for this particular application (if certain possibilities can be realized). (FSX is not well suited for a detailed medical animation, it's not well suited for a detailed automobile animation, but it's very close to being well suited for an aircraft animation).But there are a number of possibilities which MUST be realized before I can use it. These possibilities fall into different categories such as data input, data verification and visual quality issues.Each project is different in what is required (visually) in the end result animation. So I will give a simple example.The goal is to create an animation of a flight. The aircraft starts sitting on a runway, rolls out and takes off and flies around the airport and comes back and lands on the same runway. This needs to be shown visually from both a cockpit view and a follow view. During the animation, we also want to see a single data readout displayed of airspeed during the flight (we don't want to see all the gauges moving , etc... just this one data readout via some means). Very simple.I am provided the flight data. Someone else has created and verified the data and I don't care (at this point) if it's wrong or right. My job is to take this data and make a flight animation of it. This is simple flight data such as position, orientation, time, and airspeed.So... I need to be able to:1. Create the proper airport scene model, sky model and aircraft model.2. I need to be able to input the flight data of the aircraft.3. I need to be able to verify that the data is being used correctly.4. I need to make the final animations for viewing.So it's a very simple task at this point. In the animation world, the tools are readily usable, but time consuming. In the FSX world, it appears to be more complex to setup mostly because of the tools and methods you are forced to use in the FSX world. But once the initial work is done, the simulator aspect lets you make changes and generate a new version quickly (this is the appealing aspect).For example, in the animation world, I can dive right in and start modeling the aircraft and scene very swiftly in MAX10. If I need to build a building and place it in the scene it is instantaneous. In FSX, it seems a bit more convoluted in that there is no one all-powerful 'FSX MAX' editing app where all this can be done visually with little programming. (Models created and placed, cameras swung around to a new view or position animated over time, model components animated, etc.). Anyway, this FSX process for these tasks will have to be learned but it appears far slower than it's animation counterpart.Then there's the data input. Again, in the animation world it's a snap. I have found the FS-Recorder will record flight data and that can be edited and new data inserted and the data saved and then the sim re-run in FSX. This is the critical part. Without this, I can't make this application work.Then there's the verification aspect. In the animation world, you can rotate about your scene and put digital tape measures on everything and measure to make sure the runway is the correct length, width, etc. You can also constantly see the data values of anything and everything so it's easy to show someone that the aircraft is in the right place at the right time, etc. In FSX, this is more complex but may be able to be done in other ways. Like the 'goals' in the FSX tutorials, perhaps visual flight path 'dots' could be added to show the flightpath visually and that the aircraft was following the path, etc. Or the actual data values could be displayed at all times so when the aircraft was at a waypoint, you could see that the data matched properly.Then there's the visual quality aspect. In the animation realm, visual quality is the whole point so you have complete control over all aspects. FSX is very good and if certain issues such as anti-aliasing and render quality can be made good enough... it will work. One issue is resolution. Currently, I have it set to the max which is 1280x1024. Ideally, I would like to at least do an HDTV aspect if not resolution. All this can be dealt with in editing and compositing but it would be better if it were possible to generate higher res images from FSX. (It would also be handy to be able to have a mode of FSX that did NOT try to run real-time but rather rendered the images out frame by frame so the user could achieve higher resolutions than are capable realtime).Again, it would be nice if there was an all encompassing 'FSX MAX' app where you could do all these things but there isn't.So my current experimentation is with getting flight data into FSX and then re-running the simulation to see it. Currently, with my limited experiments, it seems to be working with FS-Record.I've obviously got a long way to go but it is promising at this point.Thanks for your time!

[Guest Mike Truly]

One more thing I should note.The flight data provided might be in any number of time increments but for this example, we'll say it's at 1 second intervals.After data is input... it is frequently found to be somewhat wrong. For example, it might be that the resulting flightpath is 'rough'. When this is found to be the case (which can be frequently), the flightpath must be tweaked to be smoother.In the animation world, this is easy as you can simply grab the flightpath spline and adjust vertex positions and make it smoother. Or if you have too many data points, you can just select certain data points and remove them and let the computer interpolate the spline postions.But since it's frequently beneficial to be able to see this flightpath adjustment relative to the other objects of your scene... it would be fantastic if there was some means in FSX or a utility, that would let you visually edit a flightpath in this fashion. But at this point, the solution would be to edit the flightpath data within MAX10.But it would be far more interactive to be able to do this in FSX.Thanks!