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Re: Space Shuttle

Postby MIG29pilot » Wed Oct 07, 2015 1:49 pm

Great! soon we'll just ring up a retired NASA astronaut and ask him how it looks!
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Re: Space Shuttle

Postby Hooray » Wed Oct 07, 2015 2:01 pm

you may want to use those draw-masks to see how heavy different branches in the scene graph are - you could dump the scene graph to disk and examine it using osgviewer standalone to see if there is any obvious problem
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Re: Space Shuttle

Postby Thorsten » Wed Oct 07, 2015 5:59 pm

Okay, seems I got TAEM guidance finally working. It's only implemented for Edwards, Kennedy and Vandenberg so far, but there you can choose a runway, specify whether you want to approach 'overhead' (OVHD) or 'straight in' (STRT), specify the entry point for final approach as either nominal (NEP) or minimal (MEP) and the guidance routine will give you a course to the tanget of the HAC, give you feedback about your energy state on the VERT SIT display and then tell you when to turn (left or right) - so if you keep completing the HAC maintaining 30 deg bank angle and reasonable sinkrate, you end up being delivered right into the approach.

I've tested doing this on instruments only for a few cases right to final, and it worked fine for me (got a few interesting insights into how TAEM operates on the way).

Right now you need to overlay the FG default HUD to have the direction guidance information, but I hope we'll get the ADI needle soon :-)
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Re: Space Shuttle

Postby japreja » Wed Oct 07, 2015 8:02 pm

I didn't realize how much you have already gotten done, looks awesome. I like the natural look. Some of the panels would take quite a bit of time to do from scratch because their detailed call outs, like on L1.

I see some of those light/dark spots, it looks like a vertice normal may be flipped, If you select "Display Vertex Normals" in "Mesh Display" while in edit mode I bet they will be facing inward instead of outward in those corners, I don't think vertice normals are used in .ac files, unless it is gathered from the order the verts are listed. If that's not it then it might just be the effect of mesh smooth on a normally flat face.

I am interested in getting all the switches, dials, etc... tied to properties and animated but it is quite a challenge without the labels on them. I was thinking of pulling out each panel to a Panel.Panel# mesh object and the switches, buttons, dials, and indicators to Panel.Panel#.s#/cb# as is shown in the manuals. I've never worked with FDMs so I am unsure if this would make it easier or harder to program the switches.

How are you getting the text from the photos to a texture? I'll try to use the same method so the work looks uniform throughout the cockpit. I might be able to figure it out just by looking at the textures once they are pushed.
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Re: Space Shuttle

Postby Thorsten » Thu Oct 08, 2015 6:27 am

@japreja: Since you make progress with texturing now... might I ask to give the OMS engines a paint job? Their spotless white is sort of the biggest spoiler for the visuals for me...
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Re: Space Shuttle

Postby japreja » Thu Oct 08, 2015 7:55 am

I will give it a try but I don't expect that it will match the rest of the shuttle, I'll have to use photos since they don't really match up to anything in the current textures.
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Re: Space Shuttle

Postby japreja » Thu Oct 08, 2015 10:48 pm

This song was the first wake up call for the Space Shuttle fleet on STS-1 :P

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Re: Space Shuttle

Postby japreja » Fri Oct 09, 2015 3:10 am

@Thorsten
This will have to do for the OMSPods for now, blend file here. My .ac exporter is messing up the colors again so I can't do the ac file yet. Its not what I wanted and still untextured but the black tiles are flat black/grey now so it wont be all white.

@Richard
Would you be kind enough to tell me the Blender version you are working with and post the .ac import/export files your using again? I tried looking back for it but can't seem to find it. I'll stick with that version for any more work on the shuttle.

I have been putting together a texture from photos but it will take a bit of time to find same/similar lighting and angles of the same spots to get rid of shadows. It might make the rest of the exterior shuttle texture be off a bit so I will try to do that from photos too. There aren't many panoramic photos of the exterior taken with the same camera under the same lighting. I would be nice to just visit one of the shuttles for a photo shoot :D but the closest to me is Enterprise and I am not fond of the city, not to mention the $80 ticket I would have to buy each day of the photo shoot, a hotel in NYC $$$$$$$$$, cab fair, and a GreyHound ticket. If I had the extra money I would be there in a heartbeat :wink: although it would probably be cheaper to just go to KSC. Hey NASA, feel like sending me on an all expense paid field trip? :P I can dream can't I
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Re: Space Shuttle

Postby wlbragg » Fri Oct 09, 2015 12:56 pm

japreja wrote in Thu Oct 08, 2015 10:48 pm:I have been putting together a texture from photos but it will take a bit of time to find same/similar lighting and angles of the same spots to get rid of shadows. It might make the rest of the exterior shuttle texture be off a bit so I will try to do that from photos too.

I started working on texturing osm pods and ran into trouble lining up the new texture for osm with that of the texture next to it. So I think your right and it will require a rework of the entire area. Probably why it isn't done yet.
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Re: Space Shuttle

Postby Richard » Fri Oct 09, 2015 1:07 pm

Thorsten wrote in Wed Oct 07, 2015 5:59 pm:Okay, seems I got TAEM guidance finally working. It's only implemented for Edwards, Kennedy and Vandenberg so far
...
Right now you need to overlay the FG default HUD to have the direction guidance information, but I hope we'll get the ADI needle soon :-)


TAEM looks good (from the code; I've not tried it). Are we planning to calculate the TEAM transition point or is it just going to be only for valid airports (which is fine as long as we've got all of the possibles covered).

PFD is coming along; I think I've figured out how to do the ADI ball using a couple of SVG shapes and some translation / rotation. more news this weekend.
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Re: Space Shuttle

Postby MIG29pilot » Fri Oct 09, 2015 2:15 pm

Hey Richard, have you ever watched Keeping up Appearances?
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Re: Space Shuttle

Postby Richard » Fri Oct 09, 2015 2:30 pm

japreja wrote in Wed Oct 07, 2015 8:02 pm:I see some of those light/dark spots, it looks like a vertice normal may be flipped...

I am interested in getting all the switches, dials, etc... tied to properties and animated but it is quite a challenge without the labels on them. I was thinking of pulling out each panel to a Panel.Panel# mesh object and the switches, buttons, dials, and indicators to Panel.Panel#.s#/cb# as is shown in the manuals. I've never worked with FDMs so I am unsure if this would make it easier or harder to program the switches.

How are you getting the text from the photos to a texture? I'll try to use the same method so the work looks uniform throughout the cockpit. I might be able to figure it out just by looking at the textures once they are pushed.


1. I'll investigate the vertex normal.

2. I've adopted a panel based numbering scheme for the switches (although I've only done this on L1 and the MFD); something like SW-PANEL-ROW#-COL#, a decent naming convention helps connecting to the FDM but it doesn't really matter what they're called, or even where they are in the mesh, the animations can still be connected. The connection is a lot simpler than it appears, except the rotations which need the rotation centre coordinates to be located first.

3. Extracting the text is a case of fixing the geometry; it's a bit of a black art but it's something like this

(geometry)
a. Pick a point on the image that is the most suitable as a datum, often this is the fastener at the top left, but depends.
b. Rotate the image to make it correctly horizontal from the datum
c. Shear the image to get the vertical correct directly under the datum.
d. Use perspective transformation to make the rest square.
e. Possibly rescale to make it actually square

(colours)
I. adjust white balance (optional)
ii. desaturate to grayscale.
iii. adjust brightness & contrast to just leave the white. I tend to start with -70 on brightness and adjust the contrast so most of the bg becomes black, and then fiddle about with these two to find the balance between as much black as possible, but still keeping the white. I often use quite a high zoom level to check the letters, what I'm looking for is a nice anti-aliased text with as little bleed as possible.

japreja wrote in Fri Oct 09, 2015 3:10 am:@Richard
Would you be kind enough to tell me the Blender version you are working with and post the .ac import/export files your using again? I tried looking back for it but can't seem to find it. I'll stick with that version for any more work on the shuttle.

I have been putting together a texture from photos but it will take a bit of time to find same/similar lighting and angles of the same spots to get rid of shadows. It might make the rest of the exterior shuttle texture be off a bit so I will try to do that from photos too.


I'm using 2.71, with this ac3d exporter - however what you're describing may well be because the materials and textures aren't setup in the way the exporter requires them. It seems you have to uvmap them all - and set the material to the image, and ensure that the material is using the uvmap; or at least that's what I've been doing recently to save having to fixup the model using ac3.

I've found that using photographs generally works best when you can get a single section (e.g. a wing) from a single photo and then adjust the colour balance and lighting to match the rest. It is often necessary to adjust the uvmap for items or adjust the boundaries to get them to line up and sometimes the whole lot has to be redone (e.g. when then isn't enough space in the bitmap to fit the new bit in).
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Re: Space Shuttle

Postby Thorsten » Fri Oct 09, 2015 5:58 pm

Are we planning to calculate the TEAM transition point or is it just going to be only for valid airports (which is fine as long as we've got all of the possibles covered).


I'm not quite sure what point you mean.

Entry guidance will aim to deliver you sixty miles to the landing site at 85.000 ft, Mach 2.5. From this point, the navigation changes from using the on-board state vector based on the IMUs mostly to the area navigation using TACAN and air data.

TAEM guidance aims to deliver you to the final approach to the selected runway, 7 miles from threshold, 12.000 ft. It can do so for any approach direction. If you're high on energy, S-turns, overhead approch and liberal use of the speedbrake are used. If you're low on energy, selecting the nearest runway with a straight-in approach can save you as much as 40 miles from the whole pattern.

Right now, TAEM guidance requires to put the data of the valid runway (threshold position and elevation) into the code. We could probably query the airport info API for the data, but that wouldn't tell us whether the runway is valid for the Shuttle. Since the number of landing sites is finite, I think we'll just code the runways for all of them. Internally, I think the DPS also allows only a choice of pre-loaded landing sites (mission specific), you can't just request any airport. So that's consistent.

If you want to approach any other airport, you just have to fly the pattern visually - it's quite possible unless your energy is very off.

In other matters, I've tried to address a few rendering inconsistencies, most of them home-made unfortunately ;-/ We now assign effects more consistently, and I've played some with the colors of the untextured elements (OMS, tail cone,...) and made them match better to the textured elements - there was a shader-side thing I had to change, I was a bit too liberal in using super-intense light (with color channels > 1) - it gives cool visuals, but also has issues.

There's one thing I don't understand - I can't render the gear doors with the high quality effect, they show quite the wrong lighting (i.e. appear in bright sun when the heat shield is in shadow). I wonder if someone could check whether something is odd with their normals...
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Re: Space Shuttle

Postby wlbragg » Fri Oct 09, 2015 7:26 pm

There's one thing I don't understand - I can't render the gear doors with the high quality effect, they show quite the wrong lighting (i.e. appear in bright sun when the heat shield is in shadow). I wonder if someone could check whether something is odd with their normals...

Somehow the texture mapping was lost. I fixed it for now.

There is something I am wondering about and if anyone here knows the answer.

Most if not all the objects in the shuttle_o2.blend are mapped to 2 materials (or at least there are two materials in the material list for the one object). Any idea why that is, is it actually using both those materials?

Also regarding the png texture file spstob_1.png, it appears to be aliased as spstob_1.png.001 and that can be used as the material and loaded as the png file to use for uv-unwrap. But the original material and uv-unwrap file of spstob_1.png will not work, they are black. Any idea what is going on here?

I am using a less capable computer at the moment so I did the minimum I could to get this fixed. I didn't check the texture mapping in the wheel wells.
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Re: Space Shuttle

Postby wlbragg » Fri Oct 09, 2015 8:04 pm

Heads up, I'm mapping the wheel wells at this moment.

Done!
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