Scenery beacon question

[Guest Claviateur]

Hi,I designed my scenery 3D objects in Gmax like the terminal and the control tower, the radar etc... Now I want to put on the tower the beacon that is usually present and on the radar a sort of light.How do you think I can add them? Does FSRegen add such lights? And if it does what is the exact light name I need for the tower and for the radar?ThanksMichel

[Guest]

Here is my recipe for airport beacon:make rotating cylinder with two ends in Bright_mat one green and white, and add two landing lights with respective colors also rotating.Landing lights should be pointed towards the apron so you can get nice sweeping effect as the light passes.I made similar setup before and IMHO it looked realistic.Ted

[Guest]

But on the second thought I think you want red obstruction warning light which you will make with red triangle and named Beacon2, or 3 , 4, or 5 (different cycles on/off). Mark, that the part has to be named Beacon2 not material. Fsregen makes them but they also work straight from gMax.Ted

[Guest Claviateur]

Thanks Ted I will try that as I am new to animating and lights in Gmax. I will see how it will work :)by the way is there any tutorial somewhere on the internet for gmax scenrey animations and lights ?CheersMichel

[Guest]

No regretfully there is not much about FS lights and animation. At least as far as I am aware. Most you can get is sporadic posts on various forums including this one. If you look at my recent inquiries, I am tring to get some help in utilizing fs effects for purpose of improving lights in the scenery.Ted

[arno 1]

Don't know if there are tutorials. I made one about frequency controlled animation, but that skips the basic part of making the animation. Maybe a good thing to make another tutorial about :).For the animation part, the help files of GMax should be enough. These handle all the aspects.For the lights. The MakeMDL gives the names you can use. Then just draw a shape (triangle for example) on the place where you want the light, give it the correct material (with the name from the SDK) and the exporter will give you a light.Arno

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Member Netherlands 2000 Scenery Team[a href=http://home.wanadoo.nl/arno.gerretsen]http://home.wanadoo.nl/arno.gerretsen/banner.jpg[/a]

[Guest]

I am interested in how you got the light textures to work. I built a model of the Cape May Lighthouse, NJ a couple of months ago. You can find it in the avsim file library by searching for the name or by author Steve Knoblock.I tried using the beacon material names and the landing lights without success. What I ended up doing was copying an a/c beacon effect and modifying it for the night beacon and the day beacon (for which the a/c beacon is more appropriate). But I really wanted to use a material texture of if possible something like the a/c landing lights to throw a beam out onto the water.I'd appreciate if anyone would take a look at the model or help with how a true rotating beam that reflects off the ground can be accomplished.Thanks,Steve

[arno 1]

Hi Steve,This is an interesting question :). I have made some Dutch lighthouses myself, but I haven't tried animating a GMax light beacon yet. I'll give it a try and let you know if it works.Arno

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Member Netherlands 2000 Scenery Team[a href=http://home.wanadoo.nl/arno.gerretsen]http://home.wanadoo.nl/arno.gerretsen/banner.jpg[/a]

[Guest]

I just made rotating airport beacon just as I have described above. I think the result is quite adequate. If anyone interested I can share it for the public use. It can be easily modyfied and can be used for the lighthouse. Now my question is how to slow down the rotation a bit. Add frames or reconfigure the time? And second question is: which fxeffects cannot be used with the scenery, which can and how? Ted

[arno 1]

I also did a small test with the rotating landing light last evening, but I was not really happy with the result. It seems that the strenght of the light get lower when you place it higher (as is logical of course), but when you place it at 50 meters or so, so can't hardly see it anymore. For lighthouses that is not a very strange height. I think it is more usefull for smaller heights.And Ted, about your questions. I think the easiest way is to add frames. FS uses the same timer all the time, one with 18 frames a second. So the easiest way is to just add frames. Otherwise you would have to dig in the source and change some things there.One note, I didn't make my test with a keyframe animation. I just added a RotatedCall to the scenery and let the variable 30C (that's a timer variable) control the rotation around the z-axis. If you use that approach you can chose another timer to get another rotation speed.And I can't answer you second question about the effects, as I haven't used that much effects yet :).Arno

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Member Netherlands 2000 Scenery Team[a href=http://home.wanadoo.nl/arno.gerretsen]http://home.wanadoo.nl/arno.gerretsen/banner.jpg[/a]

[Guest]

Size and strength landing_light beam reportedly is a factor of size of triangle, vertice of which is used to create landing light. I have not verified that myself yet. Perhaps steeper angle at which triangle is pointed towards the base can "extend" the light reflection on the ground. Regarding fxeffect question I know so far that they suppose to be placed using Fsregen, but I was unsuccessful at it due to "runtime 53 error". It pops out whenever I try to call the effect. So how do you place those effects in the scenery? Ted

[arno 1]

Interesting thought about the size of the triangle, I'll give that a try when I am at home.When I used effects, I placed them with SCASM. I never really tried it with FsRegen, apart from clicking through the menu's a bit, but I never got a runtime error then. I'll also have a short look at this when I get home :).Arno

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Member Netherlands 2000 Scenery Team[a href=http://home.wanadoo.nl/arno.gerretsen]http://home.wanadoo.nl/arno.gerretsen/banner.jpg[/a]