GMAX Landing gear Tutorial

Alot of the parts of the aircraft don`t need any animating in GMax they just need the tag. eg. rudder, trimtab_rudder and flightsim will take care of the rest.

But other parts such as the landing gear, and passenger doors need keyframe animation.All animations in GMax take place over a time period of 100 using at least 2 keyframes any key frames with a time over 100 are ignored by makemdl, all except a few parts of the aircraft,yep l_gear, r_gear and c_gear (There maybe some more that use above 100 but i haven`t looked into that yet, but i doubt there are) (the significance of the time span of 100 is that FS uses 1 time period in GMAX as 1% of the animation, and the actual exectution time of the animation is determined in the aircraft.cfg file most often expressed as percentage of animation per second ) As seen in part 1 you used a keyframe at time 0 and another at 100 to give the gear extension animation.So time 0-100 is the gear extension animation, time 100-200 is used for the suspension compression animation.(Note: When adding a position keyframe if it has a time of 0 the animation will not run in flightsim but rotation will work from time 0, for position the first keyframe needs to start at 1 or above) Okay so lets get back to our landing gear and add some suspension. 1) Right the first thing to do is make sure we have enougth time for our animation

2) Now select r_gear_lower and at time 100 create a new position key, do the same at 200

3) Now take the time back to 100 and click Animate then as yuo probably guessed move the time to 200, and move r_gear_lower up the r_gear_upper cylinder until you are at the point where you want your suspension to be fully compressed, the click Animate .

4) Now export to flight sim and watch the suspension as you go over some rougth ground, or when the weight comes of the wheels (urr what are they) on take off.

Okay if you want boring motionless wheels then just make an object call it anything boring_wheel will do and link it to r_gear_lower.

so following our right handed tutorial the need to be called r_tire_still and r_tire_blurred

the last first being the stood still/rotating slowly model and the last being the wo i`m on the move baby.

So for the sake of making it quick make 2 cyclinders and give each one there name then just texture them on with a nice sharp image of the wheel (r_tire_still) and one with a blurred image of the wheel, then just make sure they are both placed at the extact same coordinates (if you want) and flight sim will draw only the correct one for the speed of the wheel.

http://gmax.digitalarenas.com/ is Chris Cookson's gmax site with resources and growing links to FS2K2/gmax
tutorials and tips

Landing Gear Tutorial

Part 2