well ive been trying to model recently and well its not working.

I can never get the 3 views to match up.

I was wondering if i could get a set of 3 views from someone who has used them to make a model and were accurate.

Macc

MIKE JG wrote:MACC look at the top of this forum under the thread "Resources for modelers". Should be all kinds of links to 3-views in there.

I've tried but i can never get all 3 right so when you draw the wing over the top view the length is the same as the front view.

Macc

Which program are you modeling with?

MIKE JG wrote:Which program are you modeling with?

GMax, i have FSDS 3.5 but i dont know how to use it, but i know how to use GMax.

Macc

Sorry, can't help you with Gmax. I don't know a thing about it.

Tell me how to do it in FSDS, i'll learn that instead.

MACC wrote:Tell me how to do it in FSDS, i'll learn that instead.

Or you could ask him politely instead of telling him what he will do!

Sorry Mike, i wasn't trying to tell you what to do.

i was asking for advice, i need to think before i type in future.

sorry,
Macc

No worries, that gave me a good laugh.

Now, now, now!!! That's our society these days. Might as well laugh at ourselves before the world goes bankrupt.

Anyhow........ .............

To do it in FSDS you need to make three bitmap images of your object. Usually if you find a good three view drawing of something, say an aircraft, it will either be in three seperate images or all on one. If it's all on one image, then you will need to do a little editing with something like Infraview or Photoshop to create your 3 seperate views.

I suppose you could use the whole thing and just center the part you need and ignore the rest but having a whole sheet as a backdrop when you only need a small part would be incredibly distracting.

In the "Resources for modelling" thread there are some great links to sites with 3 view drawings for all sorts of things. Once you find a good three view you like and have seperated it into the 3 different views, you then load each one as a backdrop into FSDS.

I could go on, but the help section in FSDS explains how to load and use backdrops. Check that out when you are ready.

Just a word of caution though about modeling. Don't expect to just pick it up like second nature. If you've modeled scenery successfully then you may be ok trying an aircraft. But if you've never modeled anything before, the learning curve is very steep. In fact most of us give up and end up coming back to it some time later and learn little bit by little bit.

I'm not trying to rain on anyone's parade, I just want people to know that guys like Nick, Kevin, Rysiek, Pascal, Jake, etc. have been at this a while and it really IS NOT as easy as they make it look. Like anything, once you've done it one time, each successive time gets easier.

Just keep that in mind as you dive head first into the concrete of aircraft modeling.

As a perfect example of what I'm talking about, here is something that I made in about 3 hours the other night. It's probably going to end up as static scenery, but it could eventually be made into an AI model. If I did that however, I would go back and add much more detail since I could use LODs. However as scenery I want to be careful not to make it too detailed and therefore give it a high poly count which would tend to slow a user's computer down when they were in view.

I started on this probably a year ago and just couldn't get the turret to look right, it's more complex then it looks. But I decided to have a go at it again and after another year's worth of experience with FSDS, this time I was able to model it fairly easily. Note it isn't textured yet which is a whole other challenge in itself.

That's a T72, right? Just kidding, it's looking darn good to me

Thank you very much Mike.

Hey MACC, once you get one of the views scaled, you can measure it with the measuring tool and use that measurement for the other views. Sometimes they don't exactly match up otherwise. Use the control key (I think, may be the shift) plus the up down and side arrows to center the image in your frame. Also remember, you have to load a part of some kind before you can save anything.

Good luck!