Steps

Go Back to Start

FSDS To DXF

DXF To GMax

Building The MDL

1. When building your project in FSDS, name your parts with no spaces, use underscore to separate words.  Also do NOT start part names with numbers, the mdlmaker program does not like that and you will end up having to ok a lot of part renaming when compiling your project.  As far as part names go, hopefully soon I will post a list of names that you use to start the naming when it comes to animation etc.
2. As a rule of thumb, try not to allow one part to exceed 64k in size, as this restriction is part of the bgl code, even in FS2k2.  To test if you have a part oversized, use FSDS to compile a mdl and it will inform you of what part is exceeding this limit.  If necessary, break one part into several to prevent this problem.
3. If you feel you will be going back and forth between FSDS and GMax, then consider breaking your FSDS project into seperate parts.  The reason for this is simple, If you port over your project as a whole, then you will have to redo ALL the changes, animations and texturing every time.  Below explains a great feature that GMax has that can really help, its called GMax without the Pain.

GMax Without The Pain

Being able to use FSDS to build my aircraft is to me a god send.  FSDS is simple to use and does the job very nicely.  I am AutoCAD certified, but to me AutoCAD is way overblown with features that I will never use to build aircraft.  This is where FS Design Studio comes in.  I really hope Louis Sinclair keeps improving FSDS, and I would personally like to congratulate him on a very well designed program.

As I mentioned above, porting complete projects from FSDS to GMax can be a pain when done as a whole project, if your the type of person that tests things as you develop, such as animating a part when its complete.

 GMax supports XRefs, known as External References and this is what we will take advantage of so we do not have to keep redoing textures and animations everytime we port from FSDS to GMax.

In order to take advantage of this, we need to build are aircraft in FSDS as seperate projects.  Lets take the vertical stab of my E3 as an example.  It is complete, including the rudder and I do not think I will be making any more changes to that, so lets get that part ported over and animate it with textures.

So in FSDS the vstab and rudder are a stand alone project located at the proper location in reference to the rest of my project.  I will export the vstab and rudder to DXF and import into GMax.  Now I will animate etc and save the vstab and rudder to a gmax file on its own.

I will have a "master" gmax file that will show all the parts assembled.  Now in order to add the vstab and rudder, in this master file I will XRef these in (if you go into the File menu, you will see the XRef option) and presto, now later if I need to make a change to the rudder,  then I will not need to worry about losing all the GMax work I have done for everything else, as the only changes made or wiped out as far as porting across is just the vstab/rudder itself.

The end!

GOOD LUCK AND MOST IMPORTANTLY.....HAVE FUN!!!!!!!!

Fraser Turner
CF Development Systems