2 FSDS questions

[John_Cillis 2,406]

Have you tried my suggestion by chance, to have the interior parts of the aircraft that should be viewed from the outside as a separate model?-John

[Shaka 2]

John, I want to thank you for enlightening me. I realise that this thread has been dead for a week or two, but I felt that it was worth posting here, since I'm sure other people may be having this problem.I was having a similar problem as DesertRat. My cockpit glass would disappear if other parts of my aircraft were visible on the other side of it. It wasn't that obvious, but it bugged me. I followed the advice of cutting+pasting the glass to make it at the end of the part list, but it didn't work. I tried everything, except your idea.When I finally took your advice, and created a new model, it worked perfectly. I never even knew you could have two visible models like that. I understood that in addition to the "main" model, you had a VC model, and some LOD models. After I read your post, I decided to experiment a little. Here's what I found out.You want the transparent part to be drawn last, which is why you would normally cut+paste it back into the model. This worked for my other transparent parts, but not for my cockpit "glass" part. I still don't know why. Here's the various models I had built into my project:"Main" - regular visible model with all the parts"VC" - virtual cockpit"LOD1" - near view LOD model"LOD2" - far view LOD modelWhat I did was add a 5th model "Main2" after the "LOD2" model. The order isn't important, except that the transparent parts have to be in the first "Main" model and the other parts in the second "Main2" model.I copied all the parts from "Main" to "Main2" EXCEPT, the transparent parts that were causing me a headache. I also kept some parts that were child/parent parts of the transparent parts. So, now in "Main" we only have the transparent parts, and in "Main2" we have all the rest of the aircraft parts.It worked perfectly, and was only about 30 seconds worth of work. I spent a lot of time trying to fix it, and when your idea worked, I almost cried. I hope that if anyone else has been having this problem, and the cut+paste method won't work, you will try John's idea.BTW, how did you figure this out?- Martin

[John_Cillis 2,406]

"BTW, how did you figure this out?"Strictly through trial and error.I have noticed (and it can be seen on my recent Microlight release), that careful arrangement of the transparent parts can allow you to keep everything in one model.... I found this rule of thumb seems to work best:Tranparent prop parts go last...Transparent exterior parts, next to lastTransparent interior parts, next to (next to) last :)Everything else goes "ahead" of these partsAnd of course, Autosort needs to be left unchecked when building the model...OTH, the separate model method seems a better way of keeping the project organized, so one can avoid the issue altogether....-John

[Shaka 2]

>>Tranparent prop parts go last... >Transparent exterior parts, next to last >Transparent interior parts, next to (next to) last :) >Everything else goes "ahead" of these parts >>And of course, Autosort needs to be left unchecked when >building the model... You know, I had it this way, and it still didn't work, even with the autosort-unchecked-part. Oh well, I got it to work the other way.- Martin