Military AI Works

I'm currently making landing gear for a highly classified model, but I can't decide on how to make the nose gear bays... 3D or fake?

3D ones look slightly more realistic, but when retracted, the doors don't blend in with the fuselage, and stick out like the dog's proverbials:


Fake/flat ones don't allow you to see the gear inside the bay, but they use slightly less poly's and allow the fuselage to look nice and smooth when retracted:


Not evident here because I haven't mapped them yet, but on the "fake" version, the gear doors and all details on them will still be visible when retracted.

Here's a better view of how the 3D ones look when retracted:


Fake:



PS... my first attempt at a poll, hope it works right!

I don't know...
Vote for the quickest solution making the model available...

Giorgio

Hi Drew,
I would like to reserve judgment at the moment purely because the model is white.
I can see what you mean, and my guess is that the problem is that the doors would have to have the same curving as the fuselage. What I also know is that with the model in white it will show up all sorts of things that are hidden when painted.

Incidentally, I took a look at the competition and saw that it had 3D nose gear bay and I have never heard anybody complain about that.

I do not know if this is possible but how about 3D doors, but when they are closed you make them disappear and use the fuselage to supply the contouring and texture.

Graham King wrote:I do not know if this is possible but how about 3D doors, but when they are closed you make them disappear and use the fuselage to supply the contouring and texture.

Possible using XML, I had toyed with the idea but decided not to bother.

a) You need two fuselages one with the wheel well cutouts, one without.
b) Use XML to 'hide' the cutouts one when the gear is up.

Might be easier to make the cutout fuselasge and all the gear doors children of the wheel_well (can't remember exact name) visibilty part. This part is only visible when the landing gear is anything but fully up.

Update:

With some texture on, the 3D bay and doors are indeed far less noticeable!
This is the first time I've toyed with 3D bays, so I didn't know texturing would make that much difference!

This is about the worst I can get them to look in FS, and most of the time they look a lot less noticeable:





Please forgive the ugliness, everything's still being ironed out

@ Graham
Definitely possible yes, as it's what I ended up doing with the Antonovs' nose joint. I just could NOT get it to smooth properly as 2 parts, so when the engines are running, the 2 part nose & fuselage is replaced with a 1 part whole fuselage.

I think I may end up doing it for this model, as even though the doors look quite decent now, I tend to be too much of a perfectionist at times

Cheers for the assistance all!

Glad we could be of assistance, in which case I will now go and vote .

Oh, and while we're at it, something that's been bugging me for a while now...
What ARE those things that hold the main gear called? pods? sponsons? thingies?

I always thought they were called sponsons.

CW is probably right but we always called Gear Lumps, not very scientific or original but there you go.

Besides the flaps, what other XML goodies might you add to this one??

AS a Loadmaster on the aircraftin question, we call them Gear Pods.

My favorite is "Wheel Holsters"

Cheers, gear pods is what I called them in FSDS, but I didn't know what they were "technically" called

@Mike: Hmm, I'm not sure what I could do with it. I've only been working on it a week now, so I've not put a lot of thought into it yet.
I'm not planning on an opening cargo door, as it would add quite a few poly's, and I'm already over budget by around 800, due to the unexpected number of round parts in the reverser system. (my fault for not checking it out closely enough before budgeting and building )
But any other suggestions are welcome