GMAX DVC

Grouping & Exporting

 

Grouping Interor and Exterior

 

To achieve a Virtual Cockpit in gmax/FS2004 you need to make two groups in gmax and two groups only, there should be nothing outside the groups (that includes cameras) or else only an exterior model will be created, these two groups are named interior and exterior

 

For the purposes of this example i have just cloned my plane for both views

 

First off lets make the interior group anything in this group will be shown in the virtual cockpit and the left and right views of the 2d cockpit.

Select all the objects that you will use for your virtual cockpit then select group from the group menu then give the group the name of interior.

Next do the same for your exterior objects but call the group exterior

 

Setting the pilots eyepoint

 

To set the position of the pilots eye in the virtual cockpit, select the interior group then in the heirachy section select affect pivot only.

Moving the pivot of the exterior group will set the point at which you pan around in spot plane view, this point is normaly taken from the center of the gmax world.

 

Export Time

 

Before you export open the directory you are exporting to in windows, this will make life easier later on

 

Start off by exporting with type set to BGL, this is to give us access to the makemdl interface

 

Don`t bother entering the Latitiude and Longitude in here, at this point goto your export directory in windows (which you opened ready earlier)

In your export directory you will find two files like so, each is 12 bytes in size

The files have the name that you exported as but one has _interior at the end

Now rename the file with the exportname_interior to exportname_interior.x

 

Now we are back into makemdl, so first off on the main page set Model Type to aircraft so we create a .mdl file

Now all thats left to do is add the interior file to the LOD list, so click add and select the file you just renamed

Now just press START

Once the model is made you will be left with your model file as usual, and you _interior.x file which you might as well delete now as it is no longer any use for anything not even the next export as it only contains a pointer to memory, that memory will have been overwritten by the time of you next export.

You know what to do now with your .mdl file

 

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