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Beyond Plane Maker A Second Step into Miscellaneous Bodies/with Motion Making a Nicer Airbrake By Ray Hill Before starting this tutorial, it may help for reference if you have my 'Plane Maker Tutorial 1.0' file downloaded and installed in X-Plane, as this tutorial is based around this model. It can be found in the file library here at FlightSim.Com (tutorial_xp.zip). Please make sure you don't overwrite any of your existing work. The basic airbrake that is configurable in Plane Maker is a rather boring square plate which you can paint (via the .PNG). However it does give the flight engine the required aerodynamic effect. It is not something you can make invisible, but there is a way around this in that you can paint it with zero opacity (so it is see through), your painting app ought to have a color setting to do this. By doing this, it means that it can then be hidden and then overlaid by your (yet to be made) wonderful new object! To create this object, it's probably easiest for many to do this in SketchUp, or Blender if you are familiar with it. Your airbrake will probably need to be something like 3 feet wide by 4 feet; which is a size suitable for a Hawker Hunter (this is just an example). Once you have a standard object modelled, you can simply scale it. Below is an image of my new airbrake. To achieve the folds, I had to use ViaCAD, although there are probably SketchUp Rubies (3rd party plugins) for curving and folding, whilst Blender has it all built in. What you see below is after I have exported the object using ViaCAD's SketchUp exporter (nice of them) and after I have applied my chosen PNG texture file. When you export the object you will get the following dialogue message: The triangle count (mentioned above) is important due to the fact that X-Plane uses triangles to build and image objects. The fewer you use, then the less CPU power is required (I built an earlier one with complex curves which resulted in 30,000+ triangles). The object may now be copied into your plane's 'objects' folder and then applied to a suitable position using Plane Maker's miscellaneous objects tool, as shown below. When I originally did this, I must have got the axes a bit wrong and so had to configure the angular offsets (the last three numerical boxes) in which to get the situation correct. The value 091.0 is to allow the object to fold up further toward the fuselage. The lateral offset (mid left) was required, as I probably didn't set my axis exactly to the mid point in SketchUp. Lo and behold we have an airbrake, however...it is not animated (yet). During the process of making the airbrake, I found the X-Plane export utility for SketchUp (when using their animation tool) to be very quirky, as the focus there seems to be on buildings and scenery. So after about a day of debugging and reverse engineering, I managed to find a way to manually add animation commands at the end of an X-Plane object. I also spent a very long time finding the correct internal X-Plane dataref to use. In the end I applied the dataref editor plugin to X-Plane and browsed through all the elements to find what was changing when I hit the airbrake control. There are over 1,000 datarefs, they are documented, as a list. My trial and error eventually led me to get to the following set of commands that I manually appended to the end of the OBJ file using a simple text editor, but do make sure to save it back with an OBJ suffix. The ANIM_trans line deals with transposition. I left it in so you know of its existence. In our case, we are not moving the object, we are rotating it, so we only need the ANIM_rotate_key statements. ANIM_rotate_begin 0 1 0 tells it to use the y axis for rotation (x, z are zero) the correct dataref is sim/flightmodel... (as above). This dataref has two logical states 0 and 1, so there are two rotate_key lines. The first gives its start and end angle 0 to 0 degrees, to close it. The second gives the open condition of 0 to 30 degrees. The TRIS value is generated within the object but seems to be needed to be moved inside the ANIM_begin and ANIM_end delimiters. So after hitting the airbrake key on the model, it finally worked! Something very important to remember about Plane Maker, is that objects are just images and hold no aerodynamic value. For example, in Plane Maker, if I go into "Expert"/"Invisible Parts" and choose "hide all objects", it leaves only the imported objects displayed, which in this case is two undercarriage doors, an airbrake and a bomb. Now, if I wave my magic wand and add another external object (in this case my Skyray), which is found in the objects folder for this download the following happens... Never one to shy away from challenges of the day, I thought I would take a flight over Dunsfold in my prop-driven Skyray! But first I went back into hidden objects and unticked prop-index 0 and 1 so the prop's re-displayed. All of the above can be quite overwhelming if you are a relative newcomer to Plane Maker, so if that is the case, don't lose heart, but instead, head on over to my Plane Maker series, where hopefully, it will guide you in the right place. All the best! Ray Hill www.rayhillwrites.com

Beyond Plane Maker A First Step into Miscellaneous Bodies By Ray Hill Creating objects that Plane Maker doesn't do... After spending hours and hours in Plane Maker, we eventually begin to compare our own work with some of the high quality payware planes that are developed. However, there is no reason why your design will not fly as equally well or maybe even better than some of the professional offerings. Of course, because we are limited by Plane Maker, there are a fair few missing parts; i.e. things that we cannot create. In this article, I will go through my own baby steps on how I made some of the missing parts, such as creating simple undercarriage doors and attaching them to native Plane Maker objects. Firstly you will need to become familiar with a suitable 3D CAD package, which in itself is a far from trivial task. My own preference (on balance of price/functionality) for hobby purposes, is to use ViaCAD to create 3D solid models. Unfortunately, whilst it can export many CAD file types, there is nothing to import them into Plane Maker. On a positive, it does offer the ability to export to SketchUp (nice of them) so one can then import to SketchUp and then use the SketchUp to X-Plane add-on to then export an X-Plane *.obj format. Others may prefer just to start with SketchUp and ignore additional feeder apps. Oh, somewhere in there we also need to use a graphics editor to create/edit a suitable PNG texture file for each object. Another alternative is to use Blender and the Blender2XPlane add-on. Not being a computer artist, I personally have found Blender extremely difficult to learn, and whilst I have had some success with very simple objects, my skills are nowhere close to creating a quality airframe. I have also found the Blender2XPlane utility very difficult and inconsistent to use, which is a general problem across far too many freeware offerings. I also looked at AC3D but the fact that the X-Plane add-on was so old, did not fill me with the greatest of confidence. Each object in X-Plane has a defined programmed action that is referenced by "datarefs", the set of which (1,000+) probably gets extended and possibly modified through later versions. As you can see, there are quite a few processes going on and inevitably getting the version levels of all file objects stabilised will mostly preclude using software too far out of date. As this is a general entry level tutorial using low cost, demo or free software I will only discuss using SketchUp and its ability to export to X-Plane. For a good beginners guide on how to use SketchUp, have a look at Paul Mort's series. I would suggest that unless you are an experienced 3D CAD user, with existing software, SketchUp is probably a good place to start. But do start with simple things, as most won't learn all the skills needed to do a full wing, let alone a complete plane without significant investment in learning time. If you want to know more, do a YouTube search for "SketchUp Caravelle". So why is it all so complicated? Firstly you will see a typical wavefront .OBJ (geometric vector) file. These files may be opened with a basic *.TXT reader: Secondly, here is an X-Plane format *.OBJ file: The above is X-Plane's OBJ8 file format. For the techies it is described here. Note: You need to initially refer to section 2. So basically, software is required to translate from a 3 column system where each line is an instruction to draw a line (vector) in three dimensional space, to a 7 column format which also contains the basic geometrical three dimensional vector information, plus the texturing information (which in Wavefront would be in a separate MTL file). For your information, you can also open *.acf files with a basic text editor and see similar logic, but I strongly urge you not to start fiddling, although it is interesting to "lift the hood" and see what is really going on. In this article I am not going to discuss the basics of using SketchUp, as there are many short tutorials to be found on YouTube. However I will say that you will need to understand the concept of Rubies (*.RBZ files) which are functional add-ons which extend the product; the X-Plane exporter being one of these. For this, you will need to download the source file and then go into SketchUp preferences, choose extensions then click on the "install Extension" button and select your SketchUp2XPlane_170.rbz file, or whatever version is appropriate. At the time of writing, I was using the older 2016 version of SketchUp, which worked, but have since moved to 2019. You may also need to install other import Rubies if you have objects in different formats. SketchUp is widely used by both builders and architects, so there exists a vast library of objects (scenery, buildings, etc.) if you also wanted to export them into X-Plane. Plane Maker by default works in feet and inches, so it is important that your source 3D model uses the same units and is sized to meet the needs of your plane. Under general settings you may set Plane Maker to metric units, if that is your preference. When using SketchUp, it is very important to think about how the axes orientate. The green axes corresponds to X-Plane's long coordinate, blue to vertical and red to lateral. The dotted half of the axes are for negative directions, i.e. down, forward or port, whilst the solid axes correspond to backward, upwards and starboard. Zero is always the start point of the chosen object, and if you choose to attach new objects to aircraft reference points, then the object will map to your *.acf's component datum zero point. For an undercarriage element it will therefore map to the high point of an undercarriage leg. Within the Miscellaneous objects function, where you need to add these things, Plane Maker gives you options to fine tune spatial placement as well as any angular changes required. Below shows the axis compatibility between my preferred 3D CAD software and that of SketchUp. For a simple object, we can just use SketchUp to create an undercarriage door similar to the one below. Note that the axes is at the bottom, which is for attaching it to an X-Plane undercarriage leg. This will be OK, but it will need some positional re-tuning to your preferred effect. If this was to be rotated by animation, the axis would need to be reset to top right, as the rotation hinges along the green axis. The physical model is normally the same for either a port or starboard undercarriage leg, but it might be best to have duplicates in separately named files (may help with texturing later). For example, you may wish to paint the inside of a door with a factory primer color, whilst the outside matches the color of the lower wing or fuselage. Save it into your planes \objects folder and name it "mainwheeldoorP.obj". When using miscellaneous objects, Plane Maker will first scan the \Objects folder for a list of useable items (you may need to frequently scroll up to see the full list). You may also need to rescan or reopen to pick up modified objects. If our object is attached to a Plane Maker component that moves, it will become part of that component's motion. On the other hand, if we wish to create an inner undercarriage door, we appear to have no equivalent Plane Maker object to attach to. The same also applies in that we cannot attach to a moving object such as an aileron or an airbrake; so whilst we can create a lovely balance horn and an exquisitely curved airbrake with hinges and hydraulic actuator, we are not offered any moveable components in which to attach them to. We can actually do this but it requires the use of animation; for example we can animate in Blender and also the X-Plane plugin for SketchUp offers animation options. These may have to be mapped to a cockpit/keyboard control button and can sometimes require additional coding. However, by using some lateral thinking, you can, within the undercarriage section, make dummy retracting skids of almost zero length and radius and attach objects to them. These may then be made invisible, but if they are small enough, just add some texture and use them to appear like a hinge, to which you can then attach your object. This does not require knowledge of datarefs, so is a far simpler solution, but we are limited to available elements in Plane Maker and some undercarriage systems may require far more than what comes in the box. Anyway, that was rather getting ahead of our current topic! For now, we just simply need to paint and texture our object. Everything we need is in SketchUp, but even so, it's still annoyingly difficult for beginners, as you would have thought you could use the same texture *.png that the *.acf file uses...but no! So I highlight my object and click on the paint bucket tool, which brings the standard color tool chooser up. See that brick; click on it, then click the "color" dropdown box and choose "new texture" and select the *.png file in your model. Click OK on the next naming option and then click your mini-item which should look exactly like your *.png. Select your 3D object and then using the shift key, click the paint bucket over it and it should cover it in something. The clever part here is that we need to chose an area with the color(s) we intend to paint the object with. Now this is an extremely laborious thing to do but the principles are well explained in the following video: The video above is 22 minutes long, so there is no need to watch it now, but it will reinforce your knowledge if you invest the time. In other words, why reinvent the wheel. However, if we want to make things easier for ourselves (also less clever), we can simply choose or create another PNG file with a single color and come up with something like what is shown below... Color your wheeldoor file as shown above. Save it (*.SKP format) and then use the X-Plane export tool which will create your final X-Plane object format file. These need to be placed into the \Objects folder that holds your *.acf file. When exporting to X-Plane it may come up with a power of 2 error, which means that your source PNG is not the correct size (256 x 256, scaling up to 4096 x 4096). Remember, it needs to be square, so go and fix the PNG if required. However, even after doing this, you will need to go back in the brick/color tool, delete the old entries and reapply the changed PNG image. If it's already a power of 2 square it should work. The utility will also tell you if texturing is not complete and how many triangles are created. Now we need to add the object. Go into Plane Maker, choose Miscellaneous Objects and do the following: click the bottom left add button and enter your coordinate data similar to the second line below (for mainwheeldoorP.obj): MainwheeldoorS required different settings as it was sourced differently using different axes starting points and an incomplete texture. Note the offset roll angle which was chosen so as to make it a bit more realistic. A little tip here is to check your model in the animated view and make sure everything closes inside the wing on both surfaces. Below is the finished article... Now add an object for the starboard equivalent, then go and create a nosewheel door using the same methods from above. In my experience, I have found that SketchUp initially needs a fair bit of patience to get to grips with, but once mastered it can be used to create many amazing things, often in minutes! Below is a YouTube video by niltondc which shows the creation of a Britannia airliner from 'lofted drawings': Similar tutorial videos may be found for most 3D CAD packages. I hope, at the very least, this little tutorial helps you towards getting a foot through the door into a higher level experience. This will be followed up shortly with a very brief overview of animation. If you wish to know more about aviation science, here is a worthwhile introduction: Basic Theories of Aeronautics: An introduction to using Simple Mathematics and Physics to design aeroplanes And if spaceflight is also your thing: Spaceflight Theories: A beginners guide to rocket and space sciences "Off we go into the wild blue yonder". Ray Hill www.rayhillwrites.com

Plane Maker Tutorial Part 4 How to Create a Simulated Aeroplane for use in X-Plane By Ray Hill Cockpit, Painting, Tuning and Weapons X-Plane offers two cockpit options: 2D and 3D views. Here I will only discuss 2D views because 3D views require additional (and far more complex) software such as the freeware Blender which has a very steep learning curve. Guess what, all those payware planes you buy with fantastic graphics are built using Blender (or similar) objects. If you want to go that deep please first look at some of the many YouTube videos. You "simply" attach these quality objects to your Plane Maker items which you then hide using "Expert/Invisible" parts, but guess what, those invisible parts still form part of the X-Plane flight engines, so your base X-Plane components had better be pretty good. Objects in Blender etc. may also be animated and attached to X-Plane reference points which is how the top people do complex undercarriage doors and in flight re-fuelling probes, or even open passenger doors. So for now we simply go to "Standard/Panel 2D" to create a basic cockpit. the first thing you see is as below and to the left there are menu options from which you can drag and drop instrument choices to specific places on your instrument panel. I would suggest that minimal choices are altimeter, airspeed indicator, VSI, artificial horizon. If you are designing a high speed aeroplane you may wish to drag a Mach meter on, even onto an ASI. You may also add a flap and undercarriage control plus appropriate indicators and also rudder and elevator trim controls. In this model we also add a weapons selector which we will use at the end. Simply choose items from drop downs to the left, seeing the preview below, and then drag to your required position. The absence of undercarriage control is because I could not find it, so that is a key or joystick button! I personally spend very little time flying from the cockpit so keep my panels as simple as possible. The top menu bar allows you to import panels from other sources, but I am unsure of copyright issues. Maybe best to get on the forum and ask the author's permission first. My loaded panel is as below. Note that on the top left I have added a rotary weapon selector which is required to arm the chosen weapon type prior to firing. Any instrument that is active with a yellow box around it may be simply removed with your delete key. This doesn't alter the flight model, so play around at leisure. Start X-Plane, go into 2D cockpit view and you should see something like this. Levers and switches such as trim, flaps and weapon select may be activated by the mouse. Then use keyboard up/down arrows to adjust your viewpoint. Now we'll start the external artwork; click on "special/output texture map starting points". Plane Maker will create two *.PNG files from which it subsequently reads your color schemes. Computer art is not one of my strong points and to get down to really good detail requires a pixel level approach. I have basically found a way to do shortcuts to the standard approach which uses only one *.PNG file, which you need to edit with a paint app that can modify *.PNG files. A *.PNG is a final image; for really complex work you will need to use a paint app that creates layers of objects, fills, lines, etc., saved in its native format and then exported to the named PNG. My flight model was saved into tutorial.acf; if you look in the appropriate folder you will see these files. The backup copy of the *.acf is in *.acf(squiggle), the pref.txt is created when we first fly. We may ignore the paint2.png (because I am demonstrating shortcuts) but we do need to work on the main tutorial_paint.png. The name of this file must be preserved because X-Plane will layer it onto your flight model after it loads the *.acf file. So opening up tutorial.acf in my preferred painting app gives me something like this: fuselage sides, flying surfaces and a default background color of red, which is a real pain, as I will explain later. You may also go back into Plane Maker and use "special/reload textures" to see what that default layout will deliver, as shown below. I will paint everything in a light olive color, so using the fill option on the paint program it will look like this (I will also put a grey stripe down the fuselage and to the top of the fins). Now I said I would use shortcuts, so I have only put the line on one side of the fuselage and on one fin section. This is perfectly OK if both sides of the fuselage are identical. Once you start to use text (e.g. for registration numbers) then you need to work on both fuselage sides because the text has to be reversed. It then becomes quite difficult to preserve precise symmetry over both sides. Sorry that's how it is and it isn't just Plane Maker that works this way either. I will over-write the default red section with some custom filled color sections, using a rectangle for the canopy, a cut and paste image for wheels and color boxes for two shades of grey and a dirty brown for any exhausts. The fill color of the canopy rectangle must have opacity set to about 50% or less so you get that see through effect on external views. If I now go into "special/reload textures" it will look as follows; yes still a mess. This is because of my shortcuts, so I am using the default texture coordinates. We now need to set custom texture maps and assign them to every object. We go into "expert/visual texture regions". Every object that we create is delineated by a carefully placed rectangle chosen from your artwork. This where it can get messy because the delineation boxes are in red and often not easy to distinguish from the default red background. Furthermore as some object boxes come as hidden straight lines at the edges, you have to click a few times and using a good eye have to identify them, usually flashing somewhere along the perimeter of the square. You have to fiddle around on the flashing line and they have to be expanded out to your required position. The first tab for prop objects is opened as below. Do make sure that the second texture boxes are not ticked (that points to the second texture file that I am avoiding using). This is a contra prop so it has index 0 and index 1, you need to set texture regions for the top and bottom/front back/right left (just different choices of terminology) for each prop index. Plane Maker will often refer to objects as bodies or wings. You can experiment here because you are not changing the PNG file itself, you are merely instructing Plane Maker which part of the whole image a particular component uses. If you fool around with this you should see the image on the plane itself change colors. So now mouse click and move your square to the left of the lower fuselage section. But be careful, make sure that the black square does not extend into the red below or you will get a red and black prop. There are two props each with front and back sides so four actions are required. Your visual prop should now look like this: The next tab is for wings; make sure the button for wing one is on, then on the lower green square to the right adjust the red box with diagonals as shown below (to prevent red overspill). Then click "reset bottom/left to same as top/right" button. Now select the wing 2 button and repeat the above (wing 2 was configured for the winglets). Again select the large grey reset button above. Click the right H stab button and repeat the above process for the box to the middle right. We have two vertical stabilizers/fins so that's four sides, but since we are not putting any writing on the fins we can get away with just using one (little shortcut). You will need to work this through on both the top and button wings by just using the image with the grey stripe. Then repeat this for the second fin (Vstab 2). That's all the flying surfaces done, so hopefully it looks like this: We will now do the fuselage and get rid of the red stripe at the bottom. We do not have any misc wing or pylons, so go into the fuselage tab adjust the bounding box as below and then press the grey reset button. Experiment with sliding the top and bottom horizontal edges and see how the grey cheat line moves up and down. That completes the painting of the airframe, so now we just have the canopy, wheels and struts to go. It should now look like this. The canopy is the first item under the misc' bodies tab, so like the fuselage, simply use the edit top button, draw the bounding square out and click the grey button. A word of warning, the box will not be apparent so you may need to look for that annoying very thin flashing red line and pull it out to the required size and position. This color box should have had opacity set to 50% and thus display in X-Plane as transparent. You may also choose your own preferred color but a tint does give it more definition when flying. Ignore the rest and now go straight to the wheels and tires tab. For the wheel button find a thin flashing red line or a box and stretch it out to cover your wheel image. Click the tire box and extend your box into any black area, it only needs to be small. Do likewise for the three legs onto the grey area. So that's it, we are painted, with a see-through canopy. Hopefully this has shown you the basics of how to create an aeroplane, however as we can see, it still has plenty of scope for detailed improvement. With a bit of shape shifting and engine changes it may even be ready to morph into one of these... Once an aeroplane is painted and then flown, we can fine tune it. You may have already noticed it has ridiculously good short field take-off, even with full fuel, too good in fact! This means we have either overpowered it or underspecified its weight. I will therefore increase the start weight, fuel load and maximum weight as follows. As well as the changes above, I have also shortened the last three fuselage sections by 3ft which required the tailplane assembly to be bought forward by 3ft and raised by 0.5ft because at rotation it was hitting the runway. This also necessitated moving CofG forward by 2ft (yours may have come out slightly different as no two aeroplanes are the same). So let's go military and add a bomb! First you need an attachment point, or pylon, so to make this we go into "standard"/"misc wings", and then go into the first tab and set as below. You now need "expert/visual texture regions" and go into misc' wings. Choose the first, and as before, find and stretch out your flashing red line into a box around the color that you want to use, and click the reset button to paint both sides. To add a bomb, go into "expert/default weapons" and click the bottom left "add" button. You should see a list of X-Plane default weapons, as below. Click on Mk-82.wpn and the "open weapon" button. When you exit back to the main screen, you should see your pylon below the centre with a bomb attached. To use it, go to 2D cockpit (we didn't do 3D) and rotate the arming switch to BOM. Now all you do is fly the aeroplane and use your joystick trigger or configured key to launch the weapon. However, do it too low and you may well find you get caught in the blast. The bomb initially travels forward at the ground speed of the aeroplane, so if you're too low, you won't have time to get clear, In that case, you'd need a parachute retarded weapon for that particular game (e.g. WB188 free fall nuke). Below shows the bomb shortly after release. During the flight, we also had the bendy wings phenomena so we need to stiffen the wing spars, but don't worry, this is simple! Go into "standard/wings" choose the right hand wing flex tab and set the wing flex damping to 4. A little side note: On my first ever flight in a jetliner (a 707 to Tenerife over a dormant volcano), I remember how unnerving it was to see the wings flex up and down during turbulence. To make things worse...the engines were dancing up and down causing the spar to twist, but it never fell apart. It's amazing the tolerances they are built to withstand. In crash mode, for some reason, this particular build is unbreakable (at least on my machine) it just performs crazy gymnastics over the ground (maybe that's the contra rotating engines). Maybe yours doesn't do this, but just go into Flight mode and choose a new runway start. Oh BTW, go into developer mode and choose regenerate icons. This will give you an image in X-Plane to use. So that's it folks. Yes, the outcome is a bit rough but the point was to demonstrate a variety of build principles. I hope you enjoyed this little Plane Maker series as much as I did writing it, and if you think you are ready for more, then there is a variety of more advanced stuff for X-Plane builds on YouTube. However, make sure you have mastered the basics described here before you commit to days on end creating a higher standard build in Blender or SketchUp. As this series has been rather popular (thank you) I will follow up with some "beyond Plane Maker" thoughts so as to break the ice on things you cannot apparently do, such as undercarriage doors. See you soon. Ray Hill www.rayhillwrites.com

Plane Maker Tutorial Part 3 How to Create a Simulated Aeroplane for use in X-Plane By Ray Hill Undercarriage, Engine And Canopy Start Plane Maker, open your *.acf file and go into "standard/landing gear". If you play around with the "gear type" drop downs you will see a variety of options. Most light single engine planes will have a three single wheels either in tail dragger or tricycle arrangements. Military aircraft, particularly Navy types may have doubles in order to absorb higher impacts during landings on carriers, or others if they are carrying heavy weapon loads. The main gear always needs to be behind the C of G and the wheels need to be of a size and number that supports the maximum weight of the aeroplane that was put in for Part 1. If it's wrong for the C of G then X-Plane will always make the plane sit on its tail. If the undercarriage is too small X-Plane will unceremoniously dump it at start on the ground with the wheels buried and won't allow engine start. You need to consider the direction that the wheels retract. Nose and tail wheels usually move longways forwards or backwards. Fuselage mounted wheels usually move outwards whereas wing mounted wheels often move inwards or outwards. A fair amount of Spitfires and Messerschmitt 109 pilots had crosswind problems with undercarriage mounted near the wing root. In some respects Typhoon and Focke-Wulf 190 pilots had it far easier, apart from the more powerful engines giving much greater torque on take-off. Since this is a basic tutorial we will make life simple by having a nose wheel retracting backwards and a pair of single wing mounted wheels retracting inward, wheels being hidden in the fuselage. A word of warning if the wing wheel moves outwards the wheel will sometimes be too thick for the wing and you also need to remember to account for any anhedral or dihedral within the wing design. Probably obvious but nose and tail wheels need to castor for steering and main wheels need brakes. So in the following panel we have set three single wheels and their long arm positions. The lateral position for the nose wheel is zero (centerline), whilst the outboard positions of the main wheels are set to -4.2 for the port and +4.2 for the starboard. The main wheels are set vertically to -0.2 to allow for the wing vertical elevation and also the dihedral at the leg hinge point. All long and lateral extended angles are zero, nose wheel long angle retracted goes backward so is set to -90 main wheels retract outward so are set to -90.0 and +90.0, closing inwards so we do not need to consider dihedral. The next four columns have two sets of boxes for each undercarriage position. The leg length is set to determine how your aeroplane sits on the ground, hence the wings angle of attack during take off. The tire radius and semi-width (half width) determines the dimension of the wheels. You then need to set nose wheel steering maximum angles for slow speed taxiing and high speed on the runway. The cycle times determine the time it takes for the gear to open or close. The last two rows of boxes need ticking as shown. Brakes are the left boxes and castoring is activated by the right. In this case all legs will need to retract. Fairings are often used on fixed wheel types to reduce drag, such as on the default Cessna 172 that comes with the product. Here the work, so far, is shown in wireframe mode. I particularly want you to take note of the grey ball in the middle that shows the position of the C of G. Now we need some power. There is a choice of many types and quantity which you may mount anywhere you like. For example you may have a pusher piston engine to the rear and two small rockets on the wingtips. However since most simple setups will not allow separate engine throttling it is best to use one type because you really do not want different powers developing at different thrust lines. So here I will spice it up by shown a front engine(s) with contra-rotating propellers. I will also work through adding a small jet engine above the elevators to show the principles. This model does not fly well with the jet because the thrust line from the jet is higher so the net result is an undesirable nose down pitch particularly when landing; since we do not have independent throttle controls this cannot be corrected. So now go into "standard/engine specs". In the Engines 1 tab you need to set the generic characteristics for each engine type. Set each box as shown, be aware that for props engine RPM rarely exceeds 2,400 (prop tips go supersonic and loose efficiency) and I have chosen an 800 hp engine type. For two engines the delivered power would be 1,600 hp and so on. I have also set a maximum thrust for a jet to be used. We can ignore rockets. Now in Engines 2 tab set the number of engines to 3 in the hash box and then type to "carb recip", carburated piston for 1 and 2 and jet for 3. Plane Maker doesn't seem to allow you to set a contra-rotating prop type, so to get this we had to configure two engines. Note that the jet is vertically offset 2.40 fee. To later remove the jet just change the hash engine count to 2. I have left it here to demonstrate how an engine nacelle is created the principle is the same for a rotary or radial piston engine. So save what you have done and go into "standard/engine nacelles". We are allowed eight engines and each tab corresponds to what you put in the Engines 2 tab. We are doing the jet so choose the 3rd tab and click the "aircraft has a nacelle over this engine" box, which opens up the configuration options. The configuration boxes are a bit obtuse, it doesn't give you a half cylinder it gives you a tiny square at each center point, which you have to tediously drag out until you get 5 squares and position each accordingly. So set the number of stations to 8 and body radius to 1.4. Drag out station 2 as per below and click the ellipse button below to round it. Below that click on the grey arrowish button below the square to copy it to the next station. Repeat this and you may then scale the boxes as shown. You may make fine adjustments using the top/bottom view tab. This view should explain why the station distances are not all sequential. The points at each end are closures. Nacelles always automatically align with your engine coordinates. We now need to set the two contra-rotating propellors up. For simplicity and as my fingers are aching we will just use type "fixed" but variable pitch props with reverse thrust setting are possible. So in the Prop 1 tab set the required prop count, each prop corresponds to an engine, which is really why we had to specify two engines. Note CW and CCW means that one rotates clockwise the other counter-clockwise, which eliminates torque causing directional changes on take-off, but you may still have crosswind. I am hoping that yours now looks very close to this. Prior testing showed that this doesn't fly well with the jet, so go back into Engines 2 and change the hash count to 2. This removes the engine and the nacelle. If for some reason you want it back just change the engine count back to 3. To get the nacelle settings back you need to go into engine nacelles and click the box in the 3rd tab. We are almost finished. If you have already done a test flight you probably saw smoke coming from the prop hub. We can configure the smoke/exhaust intensity and location by going into the SFC/Sound tab. Setting for engine 1 is shown below, then go into hash engine 2 and set its long arm to 3.2 and lateral arm to +1.00. You might want to add exhaust stubs using "standard/misc bodies". I shall not do these but now go into that panel and we shall create a canopy. On the first tab click the box and then using the method described for nacelles make your canopy as per below. In the next tutorial we will paint this with a translucent effect. Note that I have set long and vertical arms, plus a pitch value. You want the canopy to be embedded into the fuselage. Before you take it flying go into the weight and balance section and set the C of G values to 21.50, 22.00 and 22.50. To start a piston engine requires about half throttle and then press Shift/Ctrl/e. Full throttle, brakes off and happy landings, note the exhaust effect. Next time we will add a basic 2D cockpit, paint it, and maybe also add a weapon and fine tune it a bit. If you did some aerobatics I hope you enjoy the flexi-wing feature, which we will fix next time. This however really illustrates the physics that are at play in X-Plane as opposed to simply moving dumb but very smart images around a background. As I said in part 1, I like to think of it as virtual wind tunnel. Ray Hill www.rayhillwrites.com

Plane Maker Tutorial Part 2 How to Create a Simulated Aeroplane for use in X-Plane By Ray Hill Flying Surfaces So we now restart Plane Maker and open our plane's *.acf file and immediately go into the "standard/wings" menu. You will see a row of tabs; for this design we are only interested in Wing1, Wing2, Horiz Stab, Vert Stab 1 & 2. The default is that all boxes are set to zero. Stay on the Wing 1 tab. Consider the wing design we will go for a low wing monoplane with some sweepback and dihedral. This needs to go near the front of the aeroplane. At this point I will be honest and state that I have already done the full build with flight test and mods plus some very basic artwork and it was about six hours work. By clicking on each up/down arrow you can fill in the boxes as per below. Set the semi-length for one wing to 18, its root chord to 12 and tip chord to 4 (if this was zero, you'd get a triangle). Give it a sweep angle of 17 and some dihedral, for stability, of 4 degrees. Bearing in mind that the fuselage was 45 feet and we now have a wing with a 12 foot root chord somewhere near the middle. Set the long arm (distance from zero datum) to 17.4 and the lateral arm from datum to 1.6 (we don't really want any lift surface too far inside the fuselage, unless we are doing a flying wing). Set the vertical arm to -0.5. Set the hash box to 9 which is sort of like defining how many ribs, then tick each section you want to be considered as flap and aileron widths. So, you should now be seeing the progress of your design in the bottom right hand image. You should also see that image of the wing geometry and location changes every time you adjust these values. Use the A, D, W, S keys to rotate and admire your work and more importantly check that it looks right. Many aeroplanes have wing tip sections (winglets) that improve aerodynamics, stability and reduce drag. We will put some on because it is a technique that may also be applied to modelling aeroplanes such as the Phantom or those with dog tooth sections such as the Hunter Mark 6 (which I have created as a Black Arrows model in the free download section). A second wing is also of use for building bi-planes, I have not tried one yet, the interplane struts may be tricky, we'll see. So do a quick save and then re-open in the Wing 2 tab, filling the boxes as below. Note the high value dihedral angle. To get this interface precise requires detailed decimal point finessing of the long, lateral and vertical arms. Note that the root chord here matches the tip chord of wing one, which is not always the case. The sweep and dihedral setting also affect the three axis arm coordinates. Now onto the tailplane/horiz stab tab. Previously the wing was set -0.5 low and here we will set the elevator +0.5 high, so it should be less affected by the turbulence from the wing. Remember to tick the elevator boxes. Most aeroplanes have a single fin and rudder, but here to show the technique let's have two fins, like a Lancaster. I reckon the Lancaster probably had two fins to give the top gunner better firing opportunities, maybe Roy Chadwick's notes offer some insight. In this design it may offer greater yaw stability and more powerful turning due to larger overall rudder area. After I did that I thought about the A-10 and considered that an auto yaw system where the plane could be set to repeatedly yaw 2 degrees left and right when the gun was fired so as to spread the impact from that awesome gun in its nose. The important point to remember here is that negative lateral arms always refer to the port side and positives to starboard. This applies to engines, undercarriage, weapons, etc. So other than that the Vert Stab 1 & 2 tab settings are identical. OK so we now have a fuselage and all pertinent flying surfaces. Which I hope looks very close to this. It looks rather promising, however I am of the opinion that if we use a standard airfoil on the tailplane it might generate too much lift and give the aeroplane a nose down pitch, which in the real world we could trim out (adds drag) but may give us undesirable characteristics when trying to land. I have therefore chosen to set thinner airfoils which not only ought to avoid that but should also have a lower drag coefficient. Here is a cheeky plug: Basic Theories of Aeronautics. Plane Maker also has an airfoil designer tool, but if you want to play please create your own files. DO NOT MODIFY X-Plane's standard offerings because it will wreck all your aircraft that use the defaults. After saving it so far, go into the "expert/airfoils" menu and choose the wings tab. Every airfoil surface created so far will show the default X-Plane airfoil. We will leave Wing 1 and Wing 2 alone and just change the airfoils for the HSTB and VSTAB sections. To do this you have to click on each box to the left of the airfoils description. This brings you into to the airfoil folder where you need to select flatplate (very thin) and press the Open Airfoil button to bottom right. You need to do this for every item. Oooh look to the bottom, I just saw "round strut.afl", for interplane struts on a bi-plane project. Vickers Vimy may become a possibility! I do have 20 objects available under "standard/misc wings" for those. Some of those in the list are not all X-Plane defaults. So that's the flying surfaces almost done but we finally need to configure controls: ailerons, flaps, elevators and rudders. In particular we will configure the chord ratio and angle changes for each control and the number of flap settings. For this we need to go into "standard/control geometry". We can do enough just on the first "controls" tab; unless we want to be clever we can ignore the rest. One word of caution though, this will be a propeller aircraft and the prop creates drag at low throttle. Were it a jet or a rocket we might well need air/speedbrakes, otherwise we would wait for ages for it to slow down. They key settings here are the chord ratios for the ailerons, elevators and rudders. These represent the percentage of the wing chord that the control surface will take. Use the settings suggested below. This will not have slats, but will have flaps so we need to set a chord ratio for those in the right hand column, leave default settings for flap CL/Cd/Cm. But below it is good to set flap extend and retract times, not too short or the aeroplane will not smoothly adapt to any pitch changes that flaps settings are very likely to cause. Set the flap detents, which is the number of available flap settings and the angles at each detent, the first one has to be zero. OK you can now save it. Next time we will cover power units, propellers and undercarriage. Time permitting I may also include rudimentary cockpit design but that might slip into a session which includes how (how I interpret) the basic artwork operates in this app. Now go into "special/show with moving controls" to check that all controls are functioning. While you're there go into "special/wireframe mode", the grey ball in the middle shows your C of G. Now close Plane Maker, start X-Plane. Select this plane by name, choose an airfield and below that choose the dropdown arrow to start at a chosen 10 nm approach. You are now a glider and should find it reasonably aerobatic, but with very bendy wings! Oops! That's physics for you. To make the wings stiffer go into wings again, choose wing flex and set the lowest wing flex damper setting to 3 (or more). Try it again. So it flies but there are few immediate graphical problems, that fuselage isn't particularly smooth and the elevators are cutting into the rudders. The more we change, the more needs changing. So now go back into wings and back the following changes to both of the Vert Stabs. Change the hash value to 7 and check all rudder boxes apart from the first. Then check the customise chords box. Just change the left and right leading edge offsets 0.10 and then just the left hand trailing edge offset to -0.10. Then do a similar process for the Horiz Stab tab. Set the hash box to 6 and tick all elevator boxes apart from the last one on the right, click customise chords then change just the right hand trailing edge offset to -0.23. Finally go into "special/Ellipse-Smooth Fuselage" which will straighten out some of those kinks. We are now slowly moving from balancing raw aeronautics with some aesthetics. Until next time... Ray Hill www.rayhillwrites.com

Plane Maker Tutorial Part 1 How to Create a Simulated Aeroplane for use in X-Plane By Ray Hill My name is Ray Hill. I have had an interest in aviation, an uncle's fault (plastic kits), since the age of about six. However, I actually spent the larger part of my life doing various roles in the IT industry. At some stage I also completed about half a PPL course. After retirement I started volunteering at Brooklands Museum and recently spent a lot of time working on restoration of their P1127 and a Hawker Hunter. Somewhere down the line I also acquired a new computer and downloaded a copy of X-Plane 10, I played with it a bit, then put it aside whilst working on the 1:1 scale big toys. That project finished, so about a year ago I started looking at X-Plane in more detail and fumbled across Plane Maker. I should maybe add that when weather was bad I was also writing some books on theories of aeronautics, rocket science and motor racing. I have always had a technical bias so am interested in how things work, so Plane Maker was intriguing. My first release was the Bell X-1 of Chuck Yeager and Right Stuff movie fame (check the file library here at FlightSim.Com). This series of articles will cover using X-Plane's Plane Maker utility, which enables you to create your own custom aeronautical designs for flight in their simulation environment. What I mostly like about X-Plane is that short of paying millions for airline or military type simulators it offers one of the most realistic flight modes available. I like to think of every flight as being through a virtual wind-tunnel covering and snaking its way around the whole world. With that in mind this means that you can model different airfoil types and test different rates of climb. You can envision and use the types of thought process that designers such as R.J. Mitchell and test pilots such as Chuck Yeager would have used, without having a degree in aeronautical engineering. For those that need the deeper science the "Mechanics of Flight" by Kermode is an excellent starting point. I am doing this on an iMAC; I cannot comment if there are any variations on different platforms. If you go into your X-Plane folder (not available on tablet versions) you will see the Plane Maker icon, so spin the prop (well even click on the icon) and fire it up. If this is the first time Plane Maker has been started the first thing you will see is a grey tube, which is the beginnings of a fuselage, as below. If it opens with an aeroplane in view just use "file"/"new" from the menu. Before we go on I would like to say that on the forums I often see comments about this and that not working in the latest version (11 at time of writing). People who have not touched Plane Maker will be unaware of the "Convert All Aircraft to Latest Format" command that is available below the "Special" menu header. So if you have upgraded and your old planes won't fly then try that. But prior to that do make sure that you have taken a backup copy of the X-Plane 11\aircraft folder from which you can selectively copy back if things go wrong. This works well for version 10 upgrades, I cannot comment on prior releases. So we have a grey half cylinder; many of the objects that we will come across start life as a half cylinder. When we save, Plane Maker will interpolate the missing side. The route we will cover is to use a sequence of procedures to create a fuselage, add some wings, an elevator and two fins. Add both a prop and a jet engine in an engine nacelle and then add the undercarriage. You may also like a cockpit and a canopy. Plane Maker uses dimensions of feet, knots (for airspeed) and lbs for weight. It is a good idea to sketch out your dimensions and design coordinates on paper so you know where everything goes, oh and know the weight. The second thing to bear in mind is where you want your datum point of zero, at the nose of the fuselage or at the middle (near the center of gravity). Personally I use the nose because if I am experimenting with a new design I can expand or shrink to the the right. Conversely If I have forgotten to put a pitot tube on the nose I can easily add from zero datum to a negative number, e.g, -8.00. If you are copying spec's from an existing design do make sure to convert any metric values into imperial. The first thing that you need to do is to consider the radius of the fuselage and the number of stations, which you could choose to correspond to actual frame positions on a blueprint. So from your grey half cylinder now click on menu header "standard", then "fuselage". You will see the fuselage build page with a number of stations (frames) as which is a good start numbered from 0.00 to 9.00 (9 feet from one end to the other, hmm), body radius of 2 feet, number of radii is the dot coordinate count that describes each half curve. A 2 foot radius may seem a bit small but as you will shortly see it is very easy to scale out. The above represents the structure of that starting grey half cylinder. The front and rear are not closed. X-Plane objects, apart from engine nacelles, generally need to be closed to give the simulator an aerodynamic shape against which it can calculate the airflow around. So I will click on the center dots of the first and last frames, I will also change the distance values for each frame so they are 5 feet apart giving us a more realistic fuselage length of 45 feet. The screen will now look like below. To the top of the grey panel, just above where it says "BODY DATA" click on the Top/Bottom tab section which will give you a top, bottom and side view of your new wonder design. Note that it's a view of a pointy ended closed cylinder. It's starting to look like it might be the beginnings of something useful. We can click on the small squares and move them around vertically and horizontally to get to our required shape. The bottom and top views work as a pair whilst for the side view each dot operates individually. Experiment with clicking and moving your dots until you get something like this. The offset to the top view and lump to the top of the side view is roughly where our cockpit canopy will go. If you click back to the "section" panel you will now see something like this. Note that by sliding things around the station positions and smoothness of curvature has changed. You may wish to simply overtype the new values to 5, 10, 15...40 or keep as is. Since we will not need to cut any metal from the drawing save time and keep as it is, at least for now. Click on the top left panel cross to go back to the starting panel and you will see the 3D fuselage view as below, yup it is rough. Leave for now. Use the W, D, S, A keys to spin it around and have a good look. We are almost at the end of the first stage but before we are allowed to save we need to give it some important information. Click on "standard/author" and fill in the X-Plane name, aircraft author, description. Click on Experimental box and put in something for the "specify manufacturer" box. Click the cross and on the main panel you now want to go into "standard/viewpoint", change the Vne box to 350 which is chosen for the maximum airspeed this design will travel at. Click the cross and choose "standard/weight and balance". Let's start with filling in the details as per below. I set the total airframe engine weight as 2,000 lbs plus a fuel load of 400 lbs. The maximum weight is 4,000 lb (maybe after adding any bombs, etc.). This value really dictates what engine power/thrust you need to specify later on. For a VTOL thrust needs to be greater than maximum weight while for a conventional plane the thrust may be somewhat less because as the plane accelerates air flow across the wings will start to generate lift. Now click on the tanks panel. We will have a fuel tank in each wing at about center of gravity (C of G), which we just set to 22.5 feet (mid point on fuselage). These will be laterally offset at 3.5 feet and vertically offset at -1.2 feet below the center line of the fuselage. Note the ratio setting which here is 50/50, obviously less if specifying more than two tanks. Click onto X and then choose "File/Save As" and name it. It should go into the Extra Aircraft folder. Here I have named it as tester, all aircraft file need to have .acf suffixes. As you change the C of G and tank positions the image moves and will center on the screen to where the C of G is. If you now fire up X-Plane and choose "New Flight" you should get the icon below, because X-Plane has found a new .acf file and the question mark is simply because a thumbnail image has not yet been created. Note that the icon name "testit" comes from what was put in for author details, not the file name. We will eventually get to a point where we will be able to generate a worthwhile icon and see a customize button so we can modify fuel loads, failure modes and any weapons. So wrapping this session up we have at least built a fuselage and got a file that X-Plane can see, even if without wings it won't do much. If you start it in X-Plane you might see this, if it's standing on end the C of G is wrong. At this point I could always plug a jet engine or rocket into it and simulate a whale scraping down a runway. The curvature of this body may even generate some lift. But for now I'll think about Part 2 which is putting the flying surfaces on. I hope this was useful and you enjoyed it and will catch up next time. Ray Hill www.rayhillwrites.com