I’ve been working on some new developments that we’ll announce shortly, but long story short, I’m building and having to animate more complex systems. And in order to do it to the fidelity that I like, it requires keyframes, and lots of them. I do believe that the 777 gear all is roughly 30 keyframes per strut just in the retract and extend cycles. All of the scissor drag links are a royal pain as I’m sure many of you out there in dev land know. To get to the point, I have rediscovered inverse kinematics. By adding IK constraints to my armature rigs, I am able to forego manually setting up animation strings, rotating each bone a few degrees and praying that things all will still line up keyframe after keyframe. Now all I have to do is define how the bones in my armatures should behave in relation to each other and other geometry. The biggest advantage to this is simply the time saved in order to pull entire complex systems together. To quote Mr. Spock, “Admiral, if we go ‘by the book,’ like Lieutenant Saavik, hours could seem like days.” Now I’m not going to elaborate on the technique specifics in this post. I’ve just been playing with stuff in my test files and I’d rather have something 777 related to show it off with. Stay tuned for Blender tricks part 2, and developers, I promise, if you’re not doing this already, you’ll like it It turned my animation world upside down when I found out how to overcome the last few obstacles. Happy building!

Cheers!

Alex

Then you have the did I just do that moments where the answer was staring you in the face for hours. A new train of thought later and the results are better than what you could have hoped for. Yes, I may be waxing poetic a bit, but I had one of those this evening, and I’ll get back to it momentarily. I’ve actually had several over the past week. I’ve just started really getting into texturing the 3d pit of the 777 and its already been an experience. Some of those moments are just learning new facets of the tools that we rely on to do our work. Some of it is realizing that I can bypass some of the export limitations and achieve greater resolution in my object file for more precision in the geometry where it is needed. Some of it is finding new software to help out what used to take much longer to achieve. Others are techniques conceived in conversations with my colleagues to get past those brick walls that we inevitably run into every now and then. I’m always amazed that the small stuff is harder than the big stuff. I know that some of you are waiting for ‘thee to get to thine point’, and yes, I know that my rambling probably isn’t the most interesting thing going on in cyberspace.

I suppose that my point is that even after years of playing around with this, the sim and the development process still has the capacity to frustrate and surprise you. This evening’s puzzle was how to texture the gear handle knob. Its a semi translucent piece of plastic or acrylic. I found that it is not a straightforward process because most of the light scattering happens below the surface. In the right circumstances, this object can appear to be illuminated from within below the surface. While its likely that you could hand texture the knob to some degree of convincing success, I wasn’t convinced that a simple texture was going to be the solution. How the mesh is unwrapped is nearly as important as the material used to render out the texture. Its shaped like a wheel yes? Okay, so what do we do? You can treat it like a hub and wheel situation with two disjointed pieces. I’m not a fan of the texture split for solids like this. Spherical unwrap gets closer, but there are fiddly bits where the effective texture resolution is zero on the wheel due to the unwrap. Long story short, the wheel ended up being unwrapped as a hub projection with a series of concentric rings radiating from the center. Unfortunately, this solution ultimately cut out the easy photoshop option. I had to dive deep into materials and try my luck at achieving the appropriate level of internal refraction. Lets just say that for hours I struggled with this. Nothing that I did ended up looking convincing. Achieving that perfect, to quote the ever quotable James May, “boiled sweet” look was looking increasingly more and more distant.

So after dinner and a drink, I’m back with the same problem. More test renders and hours pass and I’m still no closer to finding a solution. After some research and digging online, I came across a great website. The Blender Open Material Repository turns out to be a great resource for materials. I’d recommend it to anyone having material and rendering issues. I found an acrylic glass material that I felt I could adopt and modify to serve my needs. Those aha moments, well, analyzing this material’s attributes couldn’t have been more helpful. The render bake went more or less well, followed by some touch ups in photoshop and finally I felt that I had a reasonable base…plenty of diffuse illumination throughout, nice strong highlights where they needed to be etc. Never one to leave anything well enough alone, I took some ideas that Josh had during a conversation today to heart and well, can I say little victory? Imagine if you will a semi transparent doughnut inside another semi transparent doughnut inside another semi transparent doughnut. The result is going to allow you to see specular highlights from within the external mesh. Done carefully, you end up with a transparency gradation that mimics some of the refraction that happens inside the actual handle knob. Victory or not, the fact of the matter remains, this ended up being alot of work for a gear handle. I could easily have gotten much more done on the cockpit today had I just left it and let it fester for a while.

This small victory…literally at just 3 cm in diameter, is one of many that I’ve had, and one more checked off in a line of ideas that haven’t been had yet. Some you arrive at easier. Some are a little more involved. This knob was was especially involved. My whole story may seem a bit anticlimactic, perhaps a touch anecdotal, and in the grand scheme of the cockpit, it really is. However, small victories like these propel developers in new directions. New ways of thinking about things are vitally important. It makes the end result of what we’re working for that much better. And thats why I’m posting. In the name of innovation, small as it may be, it all builds on itself. If I can spread some innovation around, then I’ve done my job. If people can inspire innovation in me, then they’ve done their job. Having said all of this, I am going to attempt to keep this kind of blog posting alive. It gives all of you a sneak peak into some facets of the process. I get to tell a little bit more of my own story in hopes that maybe the community can get to know one of their fellow devs a bit better.

So a little long winded? Most definitely. Informative, insightful, or helpful? I hope so. And as you probably guessed…a little preview of tonight’s small victory. I for one am looking forward to seeing how this gear knob acts in the sim’s lighting.

Cheers

Alex

Cheers

Alex

Let me just, not to steal the phrase from Apple, lift the reality distortion field surrounding x-plane developers, especially us here at XP Jets. Most of us, and I do believe that I speak for the majority of us, actually work for a living or are in school. For those of you who haven’t gone to flight school, Dhruv spends an extremely large amount of time flight instructing, building hours, and doing his own advanced studies. I wish him the best as he’s going to graduate in a couple of weeks. As for me, I’m an art student. I spent more time in the studios than the house that I pay rent to live in during the course of the school year. I for one bit off more than I could chew this semester. There were many a day when I didn’t even come home. Add the fact that both Dhruv and I have bills to pay, well, we had to make money somehow, so we work. Its the problem with x-plane development on the high end. Yes it will pay dividends in the end, but not while we’re working on it.

Admittedly I’m a little spooked by the prospect of the 777 from ramzzess on the org beating us to the punch. It was the kick that has sent all us off of the diving board. We’re getting wet whether we want to or not. I’ve opened up Blender now that I have time and am putting the finishing geometry into the cockpit. I’ll be texturing it and animating it over the summer. I’m completely done with finals this Wednesday so believe me, there will be time. Sven has been more or less constantly plugging away on the plugin since his last post this past November, so with any sort of luck, we can cross that finish line simultaneously, possible cross the X-Plane v10 threshold as well. Dhruv will be firing up the sim doing extensive flight testing and flightmodel tweaking here following his CRJ training.

X-Plane developers live in the real world just as do the rest of us. Let me stress that real life priorities always take precedence. I’m not saying that we don’t deserve some of the chastising that we get because yes, it has admittedly been four long years. We ought to be able to finish what we’ve started and on that, you have my word, we will.

Don’t expect updates in the galleries for a while yet. We’re going to keep updates spread relatively thin because lets face it, there is nothing worse than building up undue anticipation when we’re likely at the very earliest, still a good six months off. Look for milestones, not every little extra texture or polygon that I put into the model.

Keep up the faith. As long as we’re breathing, we’re still capable of dreaming up some pretty spectacular things.
Thanks

Alex

Yeah, that’s what i would say if i would need to post news regulary. Fortunately I don’t. However, i agree with you, one post per year is somewhat sparse. Maybe I’ve lost all sense of time…

Seriously, we’re busy. So busy that I don’t shutdown my PC; I leave it on with emacs and gdb running so I don’t waste time every day setting up my environment before I can start working. And that’s the truth.

So, what’s new with the plugin? Hmm, it works. What it does right now works. But what does it do at the moment? Not enough. Not enough to say “Yes, that’s how a 777 works”. And to be honest, there are still many things missing that will make it really act like a 777. What we have now is a “framework” and some systems working or partially working. It has taken almost a year for me to get a framework that I’m happy with. Displays drawn with vector graphics, multithreading, custom and X-Plane default command handling, I/O of default as well as custom datarefs, the option to save the plugin-state together with a flight, sounds etc. All these things must be written from scratch. Then the “real challenge” began, that’s what I call the real work: put in the stuff which makes the 777. We’re not talking about “basic systems” only. FBW, AFDS, FMC, these are what really makes the 777 the plane that it is, and they are what really cost a lot of time. But that’s also the most funny part. Yeah, we have some FBW logic, custom flight director and we’ve started the FMC. None of them is finished, and what they do now they do well but they are far from complete. And you can’t just say “finish FBW first or finish AFDS first”, because all of them depend on each other, more or less. As i said: funny stuff.

We’d like to show you a short video. Normally we wouldn’t post something this early, but I think you might be interested anyway. Just showing a really basic thing: “How to enter a route into the FMC”.

Said enough, need to write some code. Bye

Monty Python references aside, it has become painfully clear that there is grumbling and murmuring going on out there in the XPJ blogosphere. We’ve been getting emails and obviously posts to the tune of, ‘are you guys dead?’ ‘Is the project dead?’ Allow me to fill in some holes for you.

First and foremost, we’re not dead. I checked my pulse this morning before I went to class just to make sure. Much disappointment was to be had when I realized that I had no real excuse not to get out of bed. Joking aside, the project is very much alive as well. There are lots of exiting things happening behind the scenes in Sven’s little computer programming universe that I still can’t even begin to fathom. We’ve got the beginnings of an integrated FMC and autopilot/flight director system taking shape along with the 777s fly-by-wire logic. The autopilot is a work in progress. The majority of the displays and vector graphics have been worked out to a high degree with a few odds and ends here and there still needing patching up. Underlying system logic and relationships are always being worked on. Bottom line is, the plugin is getting very exciting. I’ll leave it to Sven to spell out the particulars later on.

As for Dhruv, he has been working with Sven on deciphering the particulars of the system logic. He’s also busy preparing for flight instructing. If he wants to leave a few words about that, I’ll leave it to him as well.

And me, well, I have moved out of Wyoming and am going to school for a BFA in ceramic arts at Utah State University. My work on the 777 isn’t critical at this point. Much like Javier has branched off while waiting for the CRJ-200 plugin to be completed, we’re doing the same for the time being. Dhruv and I have a trio of projects for a client that we’re finishing up and we’d like to push something small out the door over the holidays. Lets face it, we’ve all got rent to pay.

Long story short (with many more facets to it than I care to go into), we’re still very busy and simply haven’t had the time to contribute to the blog when there honestly  isn’t anything tactile to show for it. We are still here though, and will be until you hear otherwise. Just keep us in your RSS feed and when there is something new worth showing, you’ll know about it when we do.

We’re not going into that handcart just yet. We are feeling better. We’re feeling happy. And yes, comedic timing tells us when to duck avoiding getting knocked out over the head with a blunt object.

“I love my mac, hasn’t given me an ounce of trouble since I’ve had it.”

Because invariably, as soon as you’ve said it, something catastrophic will happen and well, let me just say that I’m eating my words. iMac blew its video card over the weekend, quite literally not one day after I had said conversation with a couple of my friends at our local coffee shop. Needless to say, I’ve taken the iMac in, factor a day or so to look at it and order the parts, a day or two to get the parts, and say a day to install. If I’m lucky, I should have my machine back by weeks end…if not, early next week. Must say that I’m relieved that I’ve still got Apple Care on my machine for another year.

Long story short, consider Alex on vacation until further notice. Note that Sven is still hard at work…Dhruv is still hard at work, so we’re probably more or less okay.

Also keep your eyes open here in about two weeks

Cheers

Alex

We hope that you enjoy the film and a happy 2010 from XP Jets!

Cheers