I’ve been working off and on for an export script to export to X-Plane obj8 format. Its a pretty neat format, but there’s some differences about the sim that have to be dealt with.
For example, I have to scale down to .0254 and rotate x -90 degrees since the coordinate system is completely different…I’ve got that part licked in my script.
One of the things that it does is transitional and rotational animations based on a dataref value. For example, flaps on an airplane have a dataref value ranging from say 0 degrees to 44 degrees. So I have to specify a pivot point, then put in the min and max object rotation degrees and then the min and max dataref values. so the flap animation would be like so:
ANIM_Rotate x y z 0 44 0 44 sim/flightmodel2/wing/flap1_deg[0]
in this case, the xyz is the normalized pivot axis, the first 0-44 is the objects rotation. the second 0-44 is the value to relate to from the dataref…the last bit is the actual dataref.
Anyways…all thats not really important…I just wanted you all to be able to visualize what I’m specifying.
When I place an animation modifier on an object, the modifier has a pickbutton to select the pivot point, you select x y or z axis…then you type in a dataref…then you set the 4 values min max dataref-min dataref-max. Its not very visual.
I’d like a way to visualize this rotation. Since its not a very complicated keyframed animation, its just a variable degree of rotation along an axis…
I was thinking of drawing an arc spline to represent the rotation, but I don’t know how helpful that would be to the modeller. Does anyone have any ideas for showing the modeller how the rotation would look?
Someone told me that the AC3D exporter has realtime animation preview…that would be awesome! How would I begin to do something like that?