Military AI Works

Hey Guys, I've had something come up that I'm hoping someone can help me with. I am working on the LOD's for a model and I have done LOD's 1, 2, 3, and 4. In LOD 4, I have several parts that are not showing up. These parts also are in LOD 3 but show up there. (btw, this is FSDS)

When viewed in ACM I get the same result.

I tried compiling these parts by themselves (they are the wing, fuse, stab, and fin), and they all show up in FS except the fin which is the only part (of these 4) that does show up in LOD4 when the entire model is compiled.

Someone please help . This driving me bonkers .

Thanks for any input.

Jake,

My models never show up in aircraft container manager properly. Ive no idea why it happens. I have tried installing the thing lots of times over and Im always missing wings, animated surfaces alsorts. It only seems to happen on my models too. Thank god someone else sees the same thing. They all work fine in FS though yeh?

Nick

I had this kind of problem with my Dragonfly, especially with the loadouts

Man it drove me nuts

It seemed to me that some parts were corrupted, when I copied them from another lod.

Only thing I could do is completely redo the parts...

Thanks guys,

@ Nick: Nope, they don't show up in FS either. That's where I first noticed it. I've had the same thing happen with other models in ACM and they showed up fine in FS .

@ Pascal: This is what I'm afraid of . I'll try again first to recopy through "Manage Models" and if that doesn't work, I'll have to remake the parts.

Kev had mentioned something once about a bug in FSDS with the relationship of normal parts to transparent parts. You have to add the transparent parts last or the part behind them will also be transparent. I've been through that with props but this one ain't got no prop. I have deleted all transparent canopy parts and put them in last but still no joy.

Thanks guys. If anybody else wants to chime in, please do so .

Ah right I think I know what the problem might be here. When you copy parts from 1 LOD to another, you need to fix surface normals in FSDS. However I have found that this sometimes makes some polys fix to the wrong way round.
So here is what I do when copying parts between LODs.

select the parts.
copy
paste into new LOD
fix surface normals
then hit undo.
This will correct any polys that changed when you hit fix surface normals.

Sounds weird but it works for me. As far as ACM Im stumped as to why the parts dont show up.

Nick

Thanks Nick, I'll give it a try. Meanwhile, I've rebuilt the fuse and wing and in the process make them slightly lighter poly-wise; so a good thing anyway . But I'll still need to use the copy and paste method some more, so thanks.

I'll post results for our mutual benefit.

Good to know, Nick

Many thanks

@Nick: Tried it my friend but to no avail. The only thing might be I'm doing the unselect at the wrong time. What I did was:

Edit/Select All (in previous model)
Edit/Copy
Ctrl M (to move to next LOD "page")
Edit/Paste
Edit/Unselect All
Part/Fix Surface Normals
Edit/Undo

When I hit "Undo" the model returns to all parts selected. So I did 'Unselect All' again. When I compile the model and look at it in FS, the last LOD is missing wings, stab, fuse and tail. All other parts seem to be there but its pretty far away at this point so I can't tell for sure. May wind up making new parts for each LOD. I'm at the point now where they are pretty simple anyway but I'd like to clear this up before the next model.

All of the new parts I made for the model that did not go through the 'copy' process worked.

next model...hmmmmmm

You need to have them still all selected mate when you hit fix surface normals otherwise it will only fix the normals on the part you have selected at the time. i.e. the current part.

Nick

Jake sent me his model and I was looking at it.

Couldn't work out what was going on.

This a bug in 3.5 or was it also in 3.0, as I have never had this happen to me?

[edit] I can confirm though that doing a 'Fix Surface Normals' DOESN'T fix this particular problem with his aircraft - I'm at a loss.

hmmmmm strange, Ive had times when creating parts by making polys yourself makes the part completely unusable, untexturable and just crap. But never bits that won't appear in FS. Very strange.

Nick

EUREKA!!!

Drew has solved the problem. I don't understand how or why this works (and I hope he will explain it here for everyone's benefit) but he renamed the offending parts and they now appear!

Ahh yes those little tidbits of FSDS that no one really knows about until someone comes along and figures it out. One thing about FSDS, you're kind of on your own to figure it out. Abacus isn't much help.

Well, not much to explain really. I tried different things until something worked, which was renaming the offending parts.
I still have no idea why they weren't displaying with the original names.
Oh well, it works.