TUTORIAL 07 ROTATING A RADAR SCANNER IN THE GMAX FSX GAMEPACK INTRODUCTION This tutorial describes how to animate a Gmax radar scanner so that it rotates continuously in FSX. STEP 1 CONSTRUCT THE RADAR The model in this example is built with 2 parts the lattice tower and the scanner head that will rotate. NB:the electronics shed is attached to the lattice tower to form one part. The tower can be made with solid 3-D components or from double-sided planes with alpha channels in the texture to create the lattice. The scanner can be made the same way, or from a mixture of solid and alpha. It is important that all the components of the scanner are attached Page 1 of 6
(not grouped) together so the scanner rotates as one entity. To attach all parts together, highlight the first part and from the Modifier drop down window click Attach and click each of the remaining components in turn until the scanner becomes one part. Unlike FS9, the animation code tick18 is not used as a prefix to the part name, which in this case is simply scanner. Save a copy of the Gmax file before the animation is applied. That way, if anything goes wrong, you have a clean file to work with again. STEP 2 - ANIMATE Select the scanner part. At the bottom of the Gmax screen is a button called Animate click it. This will turn the key frame progress bar (above the ruler) red and the selected viewport will also be outlined in red. Page 2 of 6
Check that the slider is set to 0. Move it to the right and back a few times and leave on the far right. In the top down viewport, select the scanner and with the rotation tool in the top tool bar, rotate the scanner 360 degrees in the required direction. With the scanner part still selected and the animation button on, open the Motion tab, top left in Gmax. We need to add further motion key frames, say every 10 degrees. To do that click and hold the slider bar and move it to the next increment of 10 degrees and click the Rotation button in the motion drop down window like this (for the 70 degree position). In this example, the additional key frames have been added from 10 to 60 degrees and are represented by the blue squares on the animation bar: Page 3 of 6
De-select the scanner part and press the play button (3 buttons to the right of Animate on the top line of the bottom toolbar. The scanner should rotate. 3. ADJUSTING THE SPEED If the speed of rotation seems a little fast, to slow it down, do this: Right click the Key symbol next to the Animate button to bring up the Time Configuration window. Set the frames per second to custom and 20 fps. 18 fps is the FSX norm, but 20 is the nearest available value in Gmax: Page 4 of 6
Click Re-scale Time, increase the end time to a larger figure and re-test the animation. Adjust as desired. 4. APPLYING THE ANIMATION LABEL In FS9, the tick18 prefix to the scanner part name is all that is needed to tell FS9 to rotate the object. In FSX a prefix is not used but instead the part is annotated via the FSX Animation Manager. This is what needs to be done: Select the scanner part. In the Gmax top tool bar, click Maxscript and then Run Script and double click FSToolsMenu.ms. That will place an additional item on the tool bar Page 5 of 6
called FS Tools, if it is not there already. From this menu, select AnimationManager. From the animation list, select Ambient. In the Start and End boxes enter the start and end frame numbers, eg 0 and 90. Click Create and the settings will be added to the Object Anims box, like this: Close the Animation Manager. Save and re-export the model, remembering to export the animation too. Place the object in FSX. It should be rotating. Note that if placement is with one of the Instant scenery-type applications, ie directly into FSX, the scanner head may be seen at the base of the tower rather than it s normal position on the top. Don t worry about that, it should display correctly after FSX is re-launched. John Young March 2010 John.young@btinternet.com Page 6 of 6