Piper J-3  for Fly!

By Marty Schultz
Last update July 7, 2000

This will be about the most basic aircraft possible, all the systems that were not available in 1940 have been stripped out.
Fly! requires some systems in order to function, I'll be using the floor view panel for those.
The only electronics will be the radio, which was an option on the J-3.
I left in the emergency locator for safety :-)

I'm using TrueSpace 3.1 to do the modeling, one model for the external views and one for the cockpit views.

7/4/00 - Version 1.0 has been uploaded to AVSIM.
7/7/00 - Version 1.1 uploaded to AVSIM.  There was a problem with the low detail model that caused Fly! to crash when viewing the plane from behind and far away.


Here is the final panel, I'll probably redo the knobs and throttle animations in the future.



The cabin views:



Final model, I simplified the wing to free up some polygons so I could add the seats.  Moving on to interior modeling now.


There is one problem I can't solve, it seems to be a Z buffer problem but changing the model doesn't help.  At some angles and zooms the wing becomes transparent. This has been a problem from the beginning.  Here's a pic:


Model #8, Can't get anymore polygons to load into the editor so this is it for details.




 

This was my test model:


Model #2, new wing, prop, and wheels.  The prop needs more work, I think it will be the most difficult part to model.

Model #3, almost there, just need to sculpt the nose and prop more:


The fuel load out screen:


The weight load out screen, since the fuel tank is ahead of CG, you can't solo in the front seat with more than a few gallons of gas.  Fly! will not let you remove the pilot and use only copilot, but you can set the pilot weight to zero.