FlightGear is back, and rendering to Blender.

[chriscalef]

Well, it's been a little while, but the helicopters are back in the mix! What you're seeing is a Russian Ka50 attack helicopter, (model by Emmanuel Baranger), being piloted (if you can call it that) by yours truly in the FlightGear flight simulator, which exports a stream of UDP aircraft data packets that are read into Megamotion, preserved as a dsq sequence in Torque and then exported via XML into Blender for final rendering.

Rotor blades not included. Maybe next time.

[JeffR]

Very cool!

 

Rotor blades not included. Maybe next time.

Just say that it was that shutter-speed effect where the rotor cyclic rate matches the shutter rate :P

[chriscalef]

Just say that it was that shutter-speed effect where the rotor cyclic rate matches the shutter rate

 

Ha, not a bad idea, lol.

But anyway, first attempt here. Still needs work on rotation speed and transparency.

[Timmy]

Nice work chris :mrgreen:

[chriscalef]

Thanks Timmy!

More good times:

Almost to the point of herding a crowd of virtual humans around the level with my attack helicopter. Does this make me a bad person? :twisted:

[chriscalef]

What, did somebody mention herding a crowd of virtual humans with a helicopter? In other news, pretty sure I'm going to hell.

EDIT: Btw, does anyone have any suggestions for increasing the update rate on the shadows? I would be very happy to devote a few more cycles to smooth moving shadows, given how sharp they are on everything but the time axis. I took a look around in the engine a few days ago but quickly got overwhelmed doing a Find in Files for "shadow". :-) Figured I should ask around here first. All the shapes you see casting shadows are PhysicsShapes.

[OTHGMars]

Is castDynamicShadows = true; set for the material on the rotor and helicopter? If not, that's probably the problem. Looking great btw.

[chriscalef]

Thanks, and thanks!! castDynamicShadows did the trick! (And that's a damn nice thing to know about.)