Simple FSDS Question

[BLACKCAT]

I'm spending many frustrating hours trying to get to grips with FSDS. For all you experts, here's one which probably has a very easy answer - here goes. Aim - to produce a H shaped, single storey office building about 15' highso....I draw a template in required shape, extrude to 15'. The resulting structure is not a clean H but has parts of the top and bottom polys cutting across the spaces in the H, if you see what I mean. How do I get a perfectly clean H.

As an aside, as FSDS seems the design program of choice here, I think it could be really useful for 'newbies' if a separate FSDS section was created and the experts could post 'how tos' for we lesser mortals.

Thanks

[GrahamS]

Try it with two cubes elongated and one cube made wider, fit them together as an H. Doing it with a template will make texturing almost impossible. You will find that any inside curve will cause the problem you are seeing, you must simplify the shape you want into a collection of the basic shapes and fit them together. Each individual part can then be correctly textured and the building will look right.

[MIKE JG]

Graham is exactly right. Trying to produce simple shapes with templates is a bad idea unless you are going for a complex shape such as a wing.

Everything in FSDS and I mean everthing, is meant to be contstructed from the basic building block shaps of either a cube, a cylinder or a simple one sided poly. From those three choices you can create just about anything with a little creative editing.

The Humvees in my siggie below were built using a cylinder with about 8 sections. Through scaling and moving of points I eventually got it to resemble a Humvee. The front and back of each vehicle are one sided polygons, hence why you can "see through" the back of the very first Humvee in the picture. Saving polygons is everything.

Buildings usually can be made fairly easily just using cubes of various sizes. Remember to go into polygon mode when you are building your objects and delete any polygons (sides) of the structures that will not be visible in FS9. The bottoms of each block for example, won't be visible since they will be adjacent to the ground. So if you can't see them, there's no need for the sim to draw them and waste precious CPU capacity rendering them.

Like Graham said, your real frustration will come when it's time to apply textures to your objects. Creating custom textures and getting them to look like you want on your objects will drive you mad, trust me..........

The simpler you can make each object the easier it will be to texture it.

[BLACKCAT]

Gentlemen, many thanks for your replies.