Hi Quentin,what a pity you didn

Hi Jon Any ideas on the "non-smoothedness" when compared to with what see in Anim8or. If I am using too few polygons I would be surprised as I would have thought the opposite.Thanks for any light that you may be able to shed on thisCheers, QvdG

Hi Ansgar, I did try gmax some time ago. I found it a powerful package but did find the way it sometimes repositioned things in the windows (zoom etc) a bit annoying. I moved to anim8or mainly because I couldn't run gmax on the the NT4 machine but no problem with anim8or as it doesn't seem to touch the registry. As I understand it I will need to obtain assistance from someone with 3DSmax to build the control surfaces. But that is a long way of yet ;-)Cheers, QvdG

Quentin,What you see in the Anim8or window depends on your settings. By default, a degree of smoothing and reflection is added. It is possible to switch this off but I don't bother. Looking at your model, the top of the cowling looks good but the lower part and the rear fuselage are a bit 'chunky'. Part of the reason for the crinkly look in FU3 is you are probably using 'flat' textures so FU3's renderer doesn't apply smoothing to the shading. Look in you efile at the texture list near the top of the file. Amongst the numbers, you will see this (ignore the quotes):"OWS_NT"Change this to "PHONG" (again ignoring the quotes) and FU3's renderer will do some smoothing for you! Without this BTW, the GeeBee and Dash-8 fuselages look a bit chunky. In fact, the GeeBee's cowl looks BAD without it! If it is still too chunky, using the 'select faces' button, right-click adjacent faces and hit 'build'/'subdivide faces'. You will get a popup with a 'gravity value' in it. Experiment. A lot. Doing this has all sorts of effects, depending on the angle of the adjacent faces and their shape. Don't merely select a whole section or you'll instantly get 23,747 polygons, which won't run in FU3 :-(But hey! You're in the air ;)Other things:The reason for the see-through fuselage is you require either double-sided textures or an inner section with textures for the cockpit. My suggestion is an inner section because double-siding your whole fuselage will add useless polygons to the count. Simply copy the entire fuselage, cut away all the faces that aren't in the cockpit, select the remaining faces and 'flip normals' to put the texture on the inside. Now, move the new mesh back into the original and line it up exactly, without deselecting it! Looking from the front, resize the entire mesh slightly 'in' (smaller) both vertically and horizontally by a few taps on the keyboard. This places the new mesh INSIDE the fuselage mesh so you don't see it!The same approach can be used to block other holes if required, like engine cowlings etc. I used this method on both the GeeBee and Dash-8 cockpits as well as the GeeBee cowling ;):-wave Jon Point*************************([email protected])*************************

Thanks Jon for the welcome helping hand. I checked the e file and it was set to OWS_NT. I will try Mr Phong - unfortunatly not before next week. I have completely redone the fuselage but will leave the cockpit "holes" to last. Anyway I am having a ball and dream of flying my very own tiger over Cristian's fantastic UK South, not unlike this old guy...http://www.pilotweb.co.uk/content/articles...le.aspx?id=2882Cheers, QvdG