That's a great start Levi, the animation looks to be run off the AoA of the wing at present, we can change that to a property specific to the force generated by the individual section of the wing.. This would be as realistic as we could get I reckon. I'm working on the data needed for the Ilyushin Il-14 flight model at present, I could drop off that and work for a week on the wingflex code needed in the flight model... it's your call I'm easy whichever way.
Yes, the animations are basically based on AoA, but let's make it as realistic as we can.
Nice to hear you're working on Ilyushin Il-14's flight model, but first let's finish this little bird
Now let's talk animation..
You notice before the wing was broken up into sections that the smoothing was a uniformly long run, but now that the wings broken up the smoothing only goes as far as the end of the sections, that's because the 'end points' used here are fixed in space with no smoothing applied whereas the 'intermediate points' have smoothing applied... So we need to make the 'end points' of each section 'intermediate points'
Are you referring to this?
You can clearly see the seam left after the wing was broken up into sections:
For that, I have a simple solution. I call it 'Custom Normals', and it's done by editing vertex normals (I'm using Autodesk 3ds Max 2015):
...now the smoothing looks just like before splitting, and you will always still keeping the sections as separate objects:
Now it's going to look odd in blender but here's the trick...
For the section of the wing you're dealing with include the sections to the right and left of it and weld up the points as before... now the points on the section we're dealing with are 'intermediate points' not 'end points'.... but there's a problem the section is too long and won't work when flexing.... and that's because the outer sections are VISIBLE..... and we don't want that. So using the smallest possible alpha texture apply this to these sections...
When rendered ingame these outer section wont appear but the section of wing we do see has 'intermediate points' and not end points and thus smoothing is still applied...
Apply this trick to all sections and the wing should look as before it was broken up, nice and uniformly smoothed....
Have fun..
Simon
I'm not sure if I completely understood this trick. Some illustrations/examples would really help. I'm really curious how your trick would work
But as I explained before, even if the wings are broken up, the smoothing will remain as before using that technique of
Custom Normals.
I made the outer sections visible just to not be able to see through the wings when the sections are separating while flexing.
Now, for better results, and to not easily notice the seam because of the outer sections, I use the same technique of
Custom Normals.
This is how it looks like before the technique is applied to the outer section(the wing is flexed down only from the first section):
And after that:
Now let's see how it works in-game (only the first section have been modified).
This picture shows the opposite wing where no Custom Normals on outer section are present:
And now the wing where Custom Normals on outer section are present:
It seem to work pretty well, but now the problem are the shadows... When we change the glider's/sun's position/orientation, at certain angle the outer section will receive shadows, and the seam will be more visible (it will be very useful if we could exclude certain materials/objects from receiving shadows).
Note that in all the screens, the wings are a bit over-flexed towards down, especially the first section . In "normal" circumstances it's harder to notice the splits between the sections.All of this would not have been necessary if we had armature based deformation...
