Hi Everyone. I have a question about strange shadow effects on my model. I am using FSDS2 to build this aircraft and I am going to include opening doors, etc on it. What I did was cut the doors from the fuselage and then Copied the door, pasted it and moved the second copy a little towards the center of the fuselage. Then I joined the two doors and made "fill" polygons to give the door a thickness to it. I repeated this operation for the fuselage around the doors. Now after all is said and done and I have joined everything together and snapped it to scale I have strange shadows on and around the door. If I split the extra "fill" polygons away as a separate part the shadows disappear. Is there a way around this where you don't have to keep parts separate but you don't have the weird shadows? I assume that if you animate a part then you have to tag the "fill" part to be a child part and follow it. Anybody have any info or experience with this? Thanks in advance.Here is the shadow on the door to the right....and one without...http://forums.avsim.com/user_files/8595.jpghttp://forums.avsim.com/user_files/8596.txt

You need to apply a smoothing group to the individual polygons. see this thread on the freeflight design forum.... http://www.aerodynamika.com/cgi-bin/freefl....cgi?read=35858Brian

When I use smoothing groups, the only ones that seem to work are "0" (not smoothed) and "1" (smooth). I tried using other values, but I was disappointed with the results.Anyway, here's what I do:You want the fuselage to be smooth, but the parts that have edges (like around doors and windows) have that strange shadow effect. So, what I do is I apply the smoothing to the whole part, and then I switch to polygon mode. Then I cycle through all the polygons (it can take a while if there are lots) until I get to the polygons that serve as edges. Then, I edit the peoperties of the polygon (press F2) and change the smoothing groups to "0" to take the smoothing effect off. You can also change the polygon material here, but whatever.Do this for all the polygons that are around the edge, and usually it looks pretty good. This also works on control surfaces, where the smooth part of the wing meets the part that moves.I think that other values in the smoothing groups might be preferable to what I do, but I am generally happy with my results. - Martin

Thanks to both you and Brian for the information on smoothing groups. I was having the same problem with my Microlight project, which was one of the reasons I released it without the smoothing on the wings and tail. I applied the smoothing group suggestion, and it looks much better. When I release the final, VC equipped version of my Microlight, the wings will look smooth.In my case, I also found that the source of the odd shadows seems to be the edges. As long as I assign a smoothing group of zero to them, no shadows. However, let's say you want a smooth wing, but with a "knife edge" leading edge. In that case, applying a smoothing group of 1 on top, and 2 on the bottom, allows for that feature. Anyway, thanks to your help, my Microlight is looking even better than before :)-John