Modeling - Getting Started: Difference between revisions

Developing scenery and models for use with scenery is an important and very visible contribution to Flightgear. New users of Flightgear often ask how they can contribute, and this is a good place to start. Try looking at some of the following:

It would be helpful if people would model the area they are interested in. Generally contributions are going to be from Flightgear users who find scenery lacking in some area and choose to improve it. You are encouraged to research your own area for airport, navaid and scenery information, to contribute the data or dive right in to airport and scenery design.

To begin, you will need to create models in a 3d modeling appliction. Three popular ones are AC3D, Blender and SketchUp. FlightGear can display models in several formats, any format supported by PLIB is acceptable. AC3D is the most popular format for including scenery in Flightgear. Most or all of the default scenery bundled with a Flightgear release are in AC3D format.

If you do not have AC3D, Blender offers many import and export tools. See the Blender website for further information.

* [http://wine.techlab.info/AC3D_Tutorials/ AC3D Modeling Tutorials]

SketchUp (http://sketchup.google.com) is the easiest to use of these thre programms. But the results are very nice and profesional. I recommend SketchUp for users who are not really good at difficult computer programms.

There are several ways of doing this. The most direct way is to simply [[Adding shared models manually|add the required data by hand]].  

The easiest way is to use the [[Placing 3D Objects with the UFO|UFO's object placement feature]] (in version 9.10 or higher). When operating the UFO, left-clicking the mouse anywhere on the ground will place an object, and pressing space-up or down will cycle through the models. Coordinates of placed models can then be dumped to the terminal or written to a configuration file.  

Another method is to use [[FlightGear Scenery Designer]] ([http://fgsd.sourceforge.net/ Project Site]). After setting the paths to your scenery data, simply load up the area where you want to place the object. Load your .ac format model, and right click on the desired spot to place your model there. Export the modifed scenery to save it, rerun Flightgear and your model should be there.

Models in Flightgear use textures with SGI rgb format (.rgb extension).

You can open .rgb files in Windows and Mac OS using THE GIMP, Corel Paintshop Pro

Once you have made your model building, you will want to apply some textures to it, so it looks as realistic as possible. This is possibly one of the hardest areas, as a good model with bad textures will still look bad. Since Flightgear and the scenery data are all released under the GPL, any textures that you use must also be able to be released under this licence. This will probably prevent you from just using anything you come across on the net, unless it is already under the GPL. It is quite common for people to state that their pictures or textures are free. Since Flightgear can be sold for profit, and is released on Linux distributions that are sold, check that there are no clauses stating that the item can not be sold or used for commercial use.

[[Category:Modeling]]