Boolean Operations in FSDSv3

nickblack423 · Post by **nickblack423** » 29 Jan 2007, 01:30

Halleluiah

I just had a revelation. All the time I was worried about if I used boolean operations to cut out gear bays and cockpits etc I was gonna crank up the poly count of my project. How wrong was I. Because, as Ive been told in the past, The Poly count in FSDS counts every individual poly e.g each square on your fuselage. But when converted into FS, a poly is actually a triangle and so the poly count in FSDS is really half of what FS counts. i.e a project of 1500 polys in FSDS will actually weigh in at 3000 polys if you use aircraft container manager etc. All a boolean operation does when it cuts a hole in the fuselage, is split each poly (square for instance) in the fuselage, in 2, making triangle polys. the same as ACM reads. This means your polys dont go up when you use this function at all.

Sorry if this seems like a ramble, its very early in the AM and Ive just discovered this. woohoo. One tip I will give for all modellers though is, if you have a good fuselage made for you aircraft, save it as a back-up before using the boolean operation. Because sometimes you can get errors caused by it. Learnt this the hard way many a time now.

Nick

RipPipPip · Post by **RipPipPip** » 29 Jan 2007, 08:13

Good find Nick.
My calculations were that:
ACM polycount = 1.8 x FSDS3 polycount, btw, pretty precise.

As to gear bays - I made a dirt trick with A-10s - there are no real gear bays but kind of fake ones - when gears are going down I made a flat rectangle to show up above (below let's say) the wing / body surface, just inches close to these surfaces. These rectangles where painted by Graham with a fake black holes on them. Works pretty nice and saves a lot of polys (and work

).

aerogator · Post by **aerogator** » 29 Jan 2007, 17:54

This sounds great! I've never used Boolean except in the tutorials but it always seemed like a good way to accurately locate openings. I have been moving points around to line up with where the hole should be

and that can get sticky with 3 dimensions.

nickblack423 · Post by **nickblack423** » 29 Jan 2007, 18:10

Yeh with boolean operations you do get some unexpected side effects, like having to go throught the part and flip about a hundred polys that it has put upside down and stuff, plus you get some error messages when trying to compile sometimes.