Landing Lights in GMAX

 

First job to make the material

 

1) Open the material editor

2) Select new material

3) Call it light_land

4) Click to change the colour

5) Select colour from the colour selector, it can be any colour you want but i`m not sure how useful a black landing light would be.

 

Now to create the poly for our light

 

Because the polys won`t be visable in FS2004 we had might aswell make the simplist object we can, as single poly.

Use the line tool in create splines to make the triangle. When done call it light_land_1, the important part here is light_land anything after this as with the other tags just allows you to have muliple objects with the same tag.

Next apply an edit mesh modifier to light_land_1, once you have done that with light_land_1 selected open the material editor again and click apply.

 

Make another

 

Now clone your light and call it something like light_land_1_1, after doing that link it to light_land_1

 

Set up the z-axis

 

Select both of your lights and rotate the pivot so that the z-axis points towards the back of the aircraft .

or more specificaly so it points in the opposite direction you r desire for the beam of light.

 

 

Time to export

 

Start off by exporting as BGL, but when it asks you for the lant and long goto options and tick haslightmap then goto main and change Model Type to aircraft, after that click start.

 

Notes

 

If you can`t see the beam of light then you may need to increase the size of your polys, play with the size to get the best effect. If you make them super large then you lose any soft edge. To give you an idea of the size a landing light put on the top wing of the Curtiss Jenny in the picks above needs to be about 2ft on each edge. I am still looking at why i need to do this when the sample aircraft get away with small polys.

 

 

Multiple Lights of different colours

 

Well for the multiple landing lights just make another set of lights as above but with different numbers e.g light_land_2 and light_land_2_1

Now for a different colour to the first set make a new material as before but append the name light_land with a number ( _1) then just apply this new material to your second set of lights and so on.

 

Taxi Lights

 

These are done in the same ways a landing lights but the tag for the polys are Light_Taxi and the materials named light_taxi

 

 

Any questions mail me at chris.file@tesco.net