New member - I make my models for FMS

[ultralajt]

Hi all!

Great stuff this FMS!!! My friend recomend it to me and I already enjoy one week of crazy flying that in real life I wouldnt try yet. It is really fine thing to test yourself how you act in hurry when airplane take some strange situation in the air (or worse..close to ground or obstacle) I think I am progressing in avoiding colisions in danger situations. Cant wait to stop raining and test if in real flying will be some improvements...

And now to the case!

I biuld (real) RC planes from my own plans. I also draw them in 3D with Rhinoceros program. I find that Rhinoceros can save model as *.IWO. This format can be easily import (insert) in Metasequoia program. Then I save this model as *.X file.

I choose this aproach because I am more familiar working 3D with Rhinoceros, than Metasequoia.

Can anybody help me to answer these questions:
-how to select (let say wing of aeroplane) and be sure to select all points in wing, and avoiding to select any part in neigbourghood that dont represent part of wing....I always "forgot" some points and "include" some that I dont want....the result is messy...
- is there any aid that hep to snap the points when drawing...(something as SNAP at Autocad)
- how I now how big (or small) will be my model when working in Metasequoia? What represent the grid? Any units?

I work with Metasequoia only few days, and I also download all the tutorials that I find on web, but I did not manage to read and try all of them.

I finished already one futuristic aeroplane with my son, and also one my aerobatic model. They both are stil white without any textures, but I will soon made this and put models on my webpage.

I will let you know when I will prepare new section on my webpage with all my models.

Regards!

Mitja

[lego]

Hi welcome aboard!

As I've already built several models with Metasequoia I hope I can answer your questions:

1.) Met. uses objects for making the seperate parts more easy to select. So if your model is imported in one big piece, it will be hard for you. Maybe you can seperate wings from fuselage, etc. in Rhino before exporting.

2.) Because of the heavy surface smoothing in Met. and later in FMS in my oppinion it is not really necessary to adjust the coordinates of a point exacly with a tolerance of a millimeter...
I think there is no way to have a gridsnap in Met. (but I'm not sure as I'm not using that anyway). but of course you can use the move function with parameters to locate points absulutely and relatively with exact coordinates.

3.) The grid in Met. is 50cm by 50cm in size for each cell.
So if your model's wingspan is two gridlines width it will be 1m later in FMS...

As you've written you'r using the LWO-format (which is the Lightwave 3D format for geometry). This format supports objects (in Lightwave called Layer), but you have to prepare that in Rhino (don't know how).
I've tested the LWO-format just some weeks ago directly between Lightwave 3D and Met. and it works perfect!

[ultralajt]

Hi Lego!

Thank you for the answers!

I will try tonight!