Changelog 2.12: Difference between revisions

The new tracking animation (similar to Blender's locked-track constraint) allows easily animating complex kinematic systems. For examples gear scissors, landing gear doors attached to struts (also with links and joints in between) or also torque struts connecting multiple gears with independent compression while still tracking each other can be realized. Also any type of strut for eg. cargo ramps can be easily animated. If you get used to Blender its a really powerful tool (I have problems if trying to work with other modelling programs :P) and with using the right scripts it gets a very neat tool for creating models for FlightGear. For example for a gear scissor just add an armature with two bones, add an IK constraint to the second bone and attach an element of the scissor to each bone, and you are done. You can watch the animation in Blender and using an exporter script now it is possible to watch exactly the same animation inside FlightGear. You don't need to guess any coordinates/axes/etc. and if you modify and object you just have to export it again, without manually modifying the animation xml. There are (currently) only two axes required. The lock-axis and the track-axis. They should be orthogonal, as the rotation is only possible round the lock-axis. Internally the track-axis is always orthonormalized to the lock-axis, as calculations always are performed in the plane normal to the lock-axis. See [[Tracking animation]].  

'''Performance'''