New user - new model WIP

[sultanpoppa]

Hello veterans. I'm new and working to get as real a simulation of a ship known as the Edumund Fitzgerald and the storm that took it, as possible.

I've spent the last year working and re-working the model in Sketchup, as I was able to find a DirectX exporter. Blender doesn't seem to support DirectX anymore. I will post some of the images here.

Some of the questions I'm facing is, should the model be in feet or meters? The imperial model seems microscopic, and when I scale to metric it becomes unrealistically huge. For example, I put the 50' sailboat across the beam of the ship to use a scale, and I get some fun results.

Also, is there a way to identify lights in the config file so they stay lit while orbiting the ship? All of the lights will turn off depending on the angle you see it from, though there is nothing in the file that distiguishes one from another. Another light question is the angle setting in the config file, what range of angle can you can set? Max/min? These don't seem to affect the light at all from what I'm seeing.

Semi transparent materials such as windows, any way to set this correctly when I create the DirectX? If they are too transparent, you see all the interior, not enough and you can't see out of the pilot house windows!

Also, it looks like the latest update for Virtual Sailor does not have the wave length variable anymore? Doing wave calculations using the Rayleigh distribution model of 1:20 (height to length) will be important and part of the reason I favored Virtual Sailor over Vehicle Simulator. In order to create an accurate sea state for the simulation.

Sincerely,
A Noob

[syrphid]

Wellcome onboard, sultanpoppa!

All my VSF models are in meters, so there is no need to define scale ([scale_factor]=1).
Pay attention to the metric you use, these should be meters, not deci- or milli- meters.

Each type of light in VSF and VS has a visibility sector typical to navigation lights. The sectors used for lights are:
Red - portside
Green - starboard side
White - fore or aft
Strobe - omni directional

These sectors can be changed by modifires:
Fore - forward
Back - backwards
Omni - omni directional
Flat - forward or aft flat

The modifier "Omni" makes lights visible from all directions:
OmniRed, OmniYellow, or OmniWhite for your beautifull lake freighter Edmund Fitzgerald in the picture etc.

The simplest way to simulate differences in lighting of inner and outer spaces of 3D environment is to assign
different transparency to the sides of the window. For the daytime the outer surface should be less transparent,
while the inner one is almost invisible and can even be hole.

[sultanpoppa]

Perfect, that's exactly what I needed to know for the lights! Thank you so much!!

*edit: I should ask, what do scale, angle and diameter control? And what factors do you use to set them?

I uploaded an example of the light glitch to a private youtube link here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rN52ETaph7I. When I make the correction, I'll share the results.

Another challenge I would like to ask about, is how to make the bow splash and hull turbulance follow the contour of the ship. I have an example from the blooper file at the 22 second mark here: https://youtu.be/KpkV_fIP7FA

If you look into the big gaping hole left in the bow by the bad export (this looks rather funny tbh), It appears that the turbulence is expecting a very narrow bow, like a sailboat would make.

- SnP