Snipe Cockpit

Now that I have resumed working on my projects, here's a WIP of the Snipe virtual cockpit. I've fixed a few things and am now working on the textures. As you can see it includes much of the external aircraft. Much of what is shown here are texture templates, some parts being colour coded on my texture sheet. Some of the textures will take some puzzling out, as it is many months since the parts were uv mapped.

The arduous task of animating the cockpit begins now too. It's almost a year since I last dabbled in coding parts xml. I have also to make decisions on cockpit lighting for the Snipe. All Snipes appear to be equipped with instruments lights. However they were usually only fitted with an accumulator, which in turn had to be hooked to a generator, usually mounted on the undercarriage struts. The generator was usually only fitted for night missions. Do I cheat and enable the lights anyway? And if I do the question of implementation in FSX. I'd like to use effects instead of lightmaps. However I don't know if that's possible. Light maps complicate matters somewhat as switches light individual instruments, making maps difficult as I would have to split them up.

I'll be waiting until I have a DX10 capable computer before I enable volume shadows on the interior materials, if that is possible in an open cokpit aircraft. Hopefully it will be possible.

I'll also be exploring dropable bombs for the Snipe too.... more modeling ahead. :)



Again have a happy new year.

Rob