OldCrow

Thats interesting, to prevent the effect on ground, you could make the effect dissapear when gears are out using the visibillity argument. So I guess it all comes down to good textures

In some cases it is not enough to just add a material to your object. You must also add a texture file to your material (in the diffuse channel). This texture must be in either bmp or tga format and must be placed in the bazar/temptexture folder of lockon (for testing purposes) Also it could be a case of scale. Its important that the system unit scale is set to 1 unit = 1 meters. Then you must make sure the object you created is of a "reasonable" scale so you can see it. If its too big, you will be inside the model from F2 view and wont be able to see it. If its too small, it will be.. well too small to see.

Thats some great looking textures! +1

yea, nice movie

Download the plugins, and there will be a document explaining all hte arguments.

Wow! If thats real, we know its definately possible! The question is how..

Looking good there! And about faces, 200k might be alittle overkill, but its your decition in the end, looks very nice as it is now ;) To add the textures in 3dsmax, you open the material editor, select a material and then press teh small button by "diffuse". A window appear, choose bitmap, and browse to your file. After this the material is pretty much set up. You can change the specular and glossiness of your material, making it more shiny. When satisfied, simply drag and drop your material to the parts you want to have this texture. To add another texture, choose the next material and do the same. One note, when you add the texture to the diffues channel, the diffuse channel in your material will automatically be viewed. To go back to the main material parameters, click the button called "go to parrent", top right just above where it says "standard". Also to show the material in the viewport, you click the button called "show material in viewport". THis button is located just to the left of the "go to parrent" button

Yep, if its mapped in Maya, it will save the mapping to 3dsmax in the obj format, so that should be fine. Though, If the whole aircraft is one object, you can run into some problems. I noticed this a few days ago when I tried to export a obj file. When I imported into max, the whole model was 1 object, and since it had quite a few polys on it, FC2 didnt handle it and rendered it wrong. So I devided the model into more pieces and it was fixed. So my conclusion is that there is a poly limit per object in FC2. This limit is below 80k polys somewhere, so there shouldnt be any problems for any modesl out there. Just to clarify, this "limmitation" is per object in your model and not the total poly count. Also I havent tested this thoroughly so I may be wrong.

When it comes to textures, there are 3 things to consider: 1. your model must have map coordinates, in other words, it must be mapped. 2. on your materials, name them something unique, but dont name them the same as your texture names. 3. For testing put your textures into bazar/temptextures, and make sure they have the same name as you used in 3dsmax Later on when you're gonna make a mod out of it, you probably want to have several skin variations to choose from. To do this, you need a so called .skins file. This file should be located in the same folder as the lom file (bazar/world/shapes). In this file, it is described what textures should be used for each skin variation. To do this, you have to write the material names from 3ds max. So, FC2 uses the material names and the texture names to add the correct textures for each skin variation. Then, some info must also be included in a lua file. Im not too familiar with that part yet, but this lua file gathers info from the .skins file, so that you can name the skin variations and be able to choose them in the mission editor. Both these files (the .skins file and lua file) must be written correctly, or it wont work. You can look at the su-25 for reference on the .skins file. But when in the testing process it should be enough to just drop all the textures into bazar/temptextures as long as they have the same names as the textures you applied on your model in 3dsmax. EDIT: Just saw your post above, did you also remember to add the new bmp files on the model in 3dsmax aswell?

Alright, try this: First name your model f-15.lom. Then go to bazar/world/shapes and put your model in this directory Your lom file wont overwrite anything, since the original f-15 model is made in the older .cmd format. Lom files has a higher priority then the cmd files, so the game will load your lom file. If you then discover that there is no model at all in the game, this is often because FC2 cant find any textures for your model. So, to fix this, you put the textures of your model into bazar/temptextures. Also, there is another version of the tools that are alttle more cooperative when it comes to export. These also have been translated to english. You can find them here: http://www.simwolfs.com/1/PluginsMax7-8_b2.rar

right.. Well, its basically goes like this: You make a model, then map it, then animate it using the tools (this is explained on this forum if you use the search function) and then you export your model to lom format. Then you put the lom in the bazar/world/shapes folder, and your textures into bazar/temptextures. In order to fly with your model you need to replace one of the existing flyable aircraft. you do this by renaming your lom file to the aircraft you want to replace. There is alot of info about all of this on this forum, so remember the search function is your friend ;)

The tools currently available to export models into lockon only works with 3dsmax7 and 3dsmax8.

no no no.. You guys misunderstand! This plane is built like this! Its part of their very very detailed quallity check^^ joke aside, its probably some arguments gone wrong somewhere. And the reason why it cant take damage from missiles might have to do with the collision model

Just want to add somethig in here: Its true that it was possible to add your custom cockpits in FC1. However, as Alfa said, they came with strange bugs. Sometimes you had to scale teh cockpit as big as a football field in order to get it to show at all, and you would still get clipping problems, parts showing over other parts even if they were behind it. Now, with FC2, much of these issues seemes to have been solved. So you can make a cockpit in correct scale, parts wouldnt overlap on weird places (not done much testing on it yet though) etc etc, so it seemes FC2 is more cockpit modable friendly when it comes to custom cockpits.

hmm flying carrier.. could be fun

You can make custom 3d cockpits ;) But mfd's and hud are yet not possible. Either tools or some really clever dude could fix that

I guess thrust vectoring is the biggest problems here. If there is a way to controll the vector of the thrust, it could be very much possible. If not, the plane is gonna behave unrealisticly either way

hmm this is alittle off topic, but has anyone tried animating the burners in argument 40 in their custom model? this is the same argument you can use to get blinking and rotating lights. Only problem is that you wont see tis effect on your own aircraft, only on other players aircraft its visible. (not sure in fc2 though, maybe they fixed it??)

Interesting points. How much is possible to add "new" to the sim? As in, is it possible to add new countries? Is it possible to add new planes? Is it possible to add new ground vehicles and buildings? By new I mean units that doesnt replace any existing stuff in the game, but added as new units

This is why you should always have a backup original lockon fc installation. In fact, one lockon per mod is the safest way, or atleast 1 lockon per flyable mod.

Looks good! :) The skins are managed in the .skins file. Take a look at the su-25t.skins file in bazar/world/shapes. Then for fc1 some lines in the meinit will have to be added/edited. For fc2, I think this info is written in the lua file for the plane.

Yep thats the stuff ;) You just use, as you say, the visible arguments to have the normal nozzle show on 0-100% power and the afterburner nozzle to be shown at 100%-max afterburner

Yea, it can be pretty cool havinf that feature on the mig-29. I did encounter a minor porblem when using this method though, as it seemes the 89 and 90 arguments are also activated when the burner is engaged. So the work around I found was to make two separate nossles, one animated in the afterburner argument (with the glowing textures applied) and one in hte 89 and 90 argument without these glowing textures. There probably is a way to combine it into one model, but you need to have separate models for the glowing textures anyways (if someone havent figured out how to animate materials as arg based that is ;) )

Alright, I see. Ok, so the part you have selected here would need a rotation animation for the gear dampening I suppose. So first thing you do after this picture is to select the rotation button on the right (right next to the possition button which is active in this picture). After this, expand the "assign controller" tab, select rotation, and check if its argument based (like if you get that panel on the lower right). If not, click on the small button with the question mark in it and select arg based rotation. After this, you select argument etc. One thing to remember is that Rotation animations and Possition animations are two different things for lockon. THey are handeled separately. So even if you have assigned the rotation to arg based on an object, the possition animation wont change to arg based.

I'll be honest, I havent tried if it works in FC2, but in FC1, the stock 18 has this feature. When the power is at idle, the nozzels are "open" and when you power up, to lets say 50% power, they close. I saw the same thing on the Tornado in FC2. I know its not 100% real, but its better then nothing.. The plane I did this to myself is a F-16 made over the F-15 slot in game, and even though the stock plane didn't have this feature, it worked on my model, no problem. Besides, its not the afterburner arguments you use for this purpose, as you say those doesn't get active until the afterburner is engaged (kinda obvious). Its another set of arguments, and I think it was 89 and 90