Classic British Flight Sim

I am learning to model at the moment and use both 3ds and blender but not a to a great level.

Which do people generally use?

My plan is to develop some unsung British WW2 heroes for DCS such as:

Auster mk V
Airspeed Oxford
Avro Anson
DH Dragon Rapide
Westland Lysander

Does anyone here model for DCS?

Regards,

Jacks

I not aware of any DCS tools for Blender, so you'll probably have to use Max.

Dave, you are absolutely correct, DCS does not support Blender but I can model in blender as I find it easier to use then convert to 3DS to UV unwrap and apply textures. The real difficulty of adding aircraft to DCS is flight modelling as a new flight model has to be written in .lua and then elements written in c++ for cockpit functionality.

I have converted an fsx model of a dart kitten to appear in DCS (with the authors permission) using this method and it does appear in game. My friend is currently writing a flight model for it as a learning process.

Has anyone tried to port any of the freeware models offered on this site to DCS? If not would there be any interest in a small project to do so? I know that the author's permission is required before modifying any models but I for one would love to see a classic British aircraft in DCS especially with the new Normandy 1944 scenario on the horizon.

Jacks

I started converting my Hunter trainers to DCS a while back, but got stuck with the animation for the cockpit instruments. The external model was fine. I found the DCS tools a pain to work with.

I haven't got that far yet! I am in the fortunate position that my partner in crime is part of a Dev team and writes Kia and c++ and I have a good relationship with some of the third party teams. My plans for development are:

Add static aircraft
Develop AI aircraft
Develop flyable SFM aircraft with existing DCS cockpit
Develop flyable aircraft with bespoke non-clickable cockpit
Develop EFM aircraft with clickable cockpit
Develop EFM multi crew aircraft
Develop campaign

All of the above will be non-commercial.

I was wondering if anyone wanted to help with the modelling side as my skills are not sufficient at the moment hence why I am interested to see if people using blender or 3ds max here.

I use 3DS Max. I'd say that for most people the real decider between Max and Blender is whether you have access to a fully paid-up legit version of the former. If not, Blender is free.

I'm not a great 3DS Max artist, but where I might be able to help is with 3-view drawings (I now have the complete back issues of Warpaint from Aviation News, plus loads of other sources) and my real expertise is in reconstructing geometry from photos... i.e. making point clouds as a reference for lower poly modelling, i.e. photogrammetry:


Sea King Mk4 point cloud by Andy Ford, on Flickr


RR Nimbus point cloud by Andy Ford, on Flickr

Andy