Belenos "Bel" Stardust here with another blog installment for you. This time around I wanted to tell you all my story of how I did the CH-47 Chinook. It seems to be one of our most popular items, up to revision 2.7 (soon to be 2.8), and there seems to be no end of good uses myself and others have found for it.Let's face it, the Chinook is my absolute favorite helicopter of all. If I could marry it, I probably would... If it could cook, clean, and buy me beer, the marriage might actually work! if it could have sex.... well, let's just not go there... you get my point. I REALLY like the Chinook!
So here it was mid January 2010, when I decide to make the CH-47. I had already visited the wiki page for it, as well as Boeing's page, and several fansites for it ranging in eras from Vietnam to modern day... so I knew a lot about it already. Discovery Military also obliged me by showing an episode of "Great Planes" featuring the Chinook... I took that as a sign from Gawd... I was meant to build it.
Luckily snoe Halostar had given me a sizeable plot of land on her sim, Peaceful Dreams... in thanks for turning her on to SL, and her current income stream (which STILL puts mine to shame). So I had a dream, a build pad, a bunch of pictures, some stats on the bird, and all the prims I could rez... Not to mention a very patient girlfriend in the form of Janean Zwiers...
Ok so maybe the first draft did not QUITE look like how I wanted... at least it was a start. I was able to put enough of it together based from a model I had done of it a week before. Talk about easy... all I had to do was do math to resize it from small to OMG it actually fits me! Once I had enough of it built up, I dropped in the attachment/rezzer scripts, and the flight script... and began the initial tests....
Oh... boy...
Yeah... I have much work to do here... Unfortunately the makers of EEV type scripts failed to mention to me that those scripts are really optimized for airplanes, not helicopters....>
A couple days later... I think I finally got the script to where a helicopter might actually benefit from this. Sure enough, I was able to get it to lift off, come back down, hover around a little bit before gravity won out, you know all the normal things a helicopter is supposed to do. (After all, helicopters are definitely hands on aircraft... You cannot just skate by with them) With the basis of a flight script in place, I decided to finish the actual build... I got a hold of some little freebie items that I thought would be neat to include... most notable of these being the Terra e-Chute (highly modified for looks... sorry Cubey, that fanny pack just was not doing it for me), and a classic, the Fairchang rubber boat (painted black of course for assault SEAL and Ranger operations).
Even with these little easter eggs (plus the HUGE bandaid Janean made, her first build ever) I still faced a few problems before I could actually sell this thing...
First problem... what to do with the rotors...
Seems like a simple issue... right?
Wrong.
First off, the Chinook's rotors are 60 feet wide... that's roughly about 18m in second life measurement. 18 Meters!!!! Holy Hell, that means megaprim! Thankfully Edesse gave me about 7000 of them... not to mention someone else showed me how to use the SALT hud, which will allow u to punch in megaprim sizes and if available it will conveniently deliver it to you. That works... now I have a lovely 20 x 20 cylinder prim... make that two of them, on top of my helicopter. Only one thing for it... I opened up photoshop and textured me some transparent rotor textures.
Now at this point it is noteworthy to point out that I had been introduced to some of my competitors' work by this time through my newfound friends at Pirate Air. Their leader, Outlaw was gracious enough to show me the new CH-46 he bought from one Patrick Lawson, and give me a little flight in it. Mr Lawson runs the Real Flight company, and I have to admit, he has really made a benchmark for himself there in the aviation world. I had heard rumors also, that a couple other people were planning on making Chinooks, and naturally this concerned me if he was going to be one of those people... which turns out he was.
My course was clear... I had to finish my Chinook first!
Upon suggestion from Outlaw Acker, I elongated the nose, and ditched my idea of "painting" windows on it in favor of the (ahem) higher prim route of PRIM windows... I figured i could skimp on certain things, but windows were kinda crucial. I have to admit, the idea worked... and allowed me the pride of many great comments on how "realistic" the windows look, whatever that means. My greatest resource was a dude by name of Nacklepest Blackbart, who as it turns out, happened to WORK on the real thing in his time in the US Army! His advice was invaluable!
Not all ideas were as great though as the windows... For example, snoe suggested I put stripper poles in each model....
Umm... no. I have to admit she had a pretty compelling argument, but no... No stripper pole. Perhaps on the 2011 Super Bling model...
As it was, the Chinook was ready enough for sale. Up it went onto XStreet (btw you folks know that whenever I put xstreet in these blogs that's a link to the item in question right... sneaky little subliminal marketing ploy there... huh?)! I had acheived my goal... I got the Chinook up there before anyone else got theirs up.
Now I can finally rest.......
WRONG!
To this day I have not had any complaints from paying customers, or even those who "test pilot" for me for free products... but they say the hardest person to please is yourself... especially if you are a perfectionist like me....
So about a week after it was listed and starting to sell happily... the itch came... that bug hit me... the I gotta update this thing bug!
The rotors don't look right... I really did not like the wheel position, the hover in the script is a little shakey, the HUD looks cumbersome, the notecard needs to be refined... the list went on and on (in truth it still does).
My first task was the rotors, and the flight script. Enter my begging and pleading to Janean to front me some "investment capital" to purchase an item called Sculpt Studio.... by the way it costs 4999 L$. I know i needed it cause I had downloaded Blender and almost slit my wrists trying to figure out how to make a 3 bladed Chinook rotor, and have it upload to SL in a manner where it does not look like utter crap...
Not to mention there was the little thing of how to transition from hover to forward flight with the least amount of headache... I examined every script I could find that was mod... Looked at every helicopter in my inventory to try and guess at it, and finally came to the conclusion that if I was finding it difficult to control, my clients will be too. My best bet was to keep the two flight mode system, of HOVER and NORMAL, but just refine them.
A week or two later, I had sculpted prim rotors made, and the script itself was retooled somewhat for the hover efficiency tweaks I had in mind.
With a somewhat stable version ready, I also decided to expand on it by creating several models for people to choose... The Desert Storm, Air Force MH-47, British Airways, Vintage Look, in addition to my original, Army Green model (Btw, notice the also subtle links to the xstreet pages of each). So instead of ONE Chinook model... there are 5... consider the market cornered. I love choices! :-)
One can never rest on one's laurels however... and even with the new versions and better script, it is STILL not enough for me. I can do better. I made the seats sculpted... I changed this texture and that, I changed the speed and sculpt of the rotors, the speed and sound of the ramps, even the pilot sit pose! Pretty much doing everything I can to make the Chinook one of the best helicopters out there. There was ONE thing that eluded me for the longest time, till I had help from an unexpected source...
My Chinook COULD NOT carry vehicles!!!
One of the few times I actually met Patrick I even mentioned this in passing, which I am sure gave him a chuckle, since that is apparently what he is BEST known for, is cranes and the like. No matter how good I could make the Chinook, or how refined the flight script is... It would never be AS good... until it could pick stuff up.
Here's how I figured it out...
A little known SL rope maven named Komrade Podolsky had published a rope script a few years ago open source... and I had gotten my hands on it and managed to make all sorts of good things, like "avatar on a rope" for example...
This amused Janean greatly by the way, and she was happy to see her investment money wisely spent so that i could dangle in the air...
It also helped that I had decided to take a break from the Chinook, and work on another large helicopter, the CH53-E Super Stallion (the subject of my next blog). This gave me the time away from the Chinook to clear my head and approach everything from a different avenue.
After much MUCH experimentation, I was able to rudimentarily get the stupid thing to lift up a 3 x 3 plywood block.
Yay!
There was much rejoicing. I have to add that whomever decided to create the physics in SL should be slapped with a pimp glove. What fool arbitrarily came up with the materials and weights used in prim building, and why didn't they tell me that making a glass airplane, while great at reducing friction, also means you do not have the mass to pick up stuff made out of say wood.
Once i figured out this little secret, the rest came together enough for me to at least ATTEMPT to pick up a cargo container with a Chinook.
OH BOY! It works!!! Except the rope seems to fly crooked? I am not sure this follow/ rope script was such a good idea. So I did what anyone else in that situation would do... I deferred to a higher authority on the subject of SL ropes... I sent an IM to Komrade Podolsky.
To my shock and amazement, the man who rarely logs in, ACTUALLY logged in! I guess he was curious to see what a helicopter could possibly do with rope... But nevertheless, he was able to see what I was trying to accomplish, and open my eyes to the script tweaks it needed to actually function PROPERLY (and where the weight and material of the helo makes no difference) Now, not only did I have a Chinook i could be proud of, but another selling feature.. make that TWO selling features!
- The ability to carry vehicles within a sim (I don't think anyone has really solved the sim crossing with a vehicle issue yet)
and two- Two internal loadouts (passenger variant carrying up to 12 people, and cargo variant, which carries 3 total but has room for the newly included Hummer Truck... another little freebie I stumbled upon and greatly modified for inclusion).
That, plus some major changes to the flight script... yes again... have made the Chinook better than ever, as my sales figures still attest to. The ideas keep rolling in, and as such, the updates will keep rolling out!
Now if only I could figure how to make the Chinook with all its various models actually sell MORE than the ONE model of CH-53 Super Stallion I have...
But that is the subject of another blog.......
