Howto:Place 3D objects with the UFO: Difference between revisions

A very useful tool for placing objects within the scenery, created by Melchior Franz, is available with Flightgear 0.9.10 and later. It is an addon to the [[UFO from the 'White Project' of the UNESCO|UFO]] aircraft which allows a user to place a new (or old) 3D object at any arbitrary location in the scenery with just a few clicks of the mouse.

The first thing you need is a 3d model file to place in the scenery; let's say we'll use a catii-iii.xml object. You must save it in a path where this UFO feature can find it. The UFO searches the objects in the Flightgear/data/Models/ directory. In this example, we create a subdirectory called Tabu and save our catii-iii.xml there.

[[Image:Placing_objects_with_UFO_html_m49fbed81.jpg]]

Now start Flightgear, and choose UFO as your aircraft.

Once Flightgear has been started, fly with the UFO to the place you want the model to be positioned.

[[Image:Placing_objects_with_UFO_html_12ee70a1.jpg]]

Fly closer to the ground with the UFO, so that you can see it better.

[[Image:Placing_objects_with_UFO_html_439816e9.jpg]]

Now that the model is correctly positioned, press the D key to dump the model position data to the terminal. A few lines will be printed on the console, providing the necessary orientation data. You will save those coordinates into a scenery objects file in the next step. If you don't do that, next time you run Flightgear it will know nothing about the new object.

Now you have your object's position saved, and it will appear inside the scenery every time you start Flightgear.

If you press the E key while developing sceneries with Ufo, fgfs will generate an xml file with the dump of your current work, this file can be after  reloaded giving the --config=path_to_file parameter.

Example for Linux:

  fgfs --config=$HOME/.fgfs/ufo-model-export.xml

See the [[UFO from the 'White Project' of the UNESCO]] page for ufo command keys.