Solidworks to Realflight workflow help? Drones

R

radman31

New member
Hi all, I do lots of work designing drones and would love to be able to bring them into realflight 9. There are lots of tutorials and help for fixed wing and helicopters but none for drones. I can export my file (by going through fusion360) into a .fbx format, but when trying to import I get :
"Error: Cannot locate path to texture file within KEX file. Corrupted KEX file?"

Now I'm not bothered about having textures and colours if that is what this is referring to. Also is the fact is says KEX file fine even though Im importing a fbx file?

Is there an example set of drone files I can use to practice my importing and set up? ie not rfx type

Thanks, Happy to make a tutorial series on you tube if I can get it down
 
An attached texture is a necessity for importing into real flight. It can be a solid color and must be square divisible by 256.
So 256x256...512x512 and so on. with 4096x4096 being the largest for most models.
It calls it a kex because the import process converts your fbx to a .kex and it errors out because of the missing texture.
Proper naming is also expected. ~CS_ is a prefix to consider a part individual and breakable. Unnamed parts will be considered a part of it's parent changing the parent's shape in the editor.
The exception to the prefix rule is "Fuselage" It is the root frame therefore is automatically considered individual and it is the parent of all other parts.
So with a multi rotor you will have a Fuselage parent to the number of arms each of which will be named ~CS_Tailboom1 through the total number of arms present. Those will be parent to their own corresponding ~CS_EnginePivot and finally as children of the EnginePivot you have ~CS_Spinner and ~CS_Engine each of which will have the same number suffix as the tailboom they belong to.
the part of your model that will visually rotate will be your ~CS_Spinner objects. E.g. motor bells and prop nuts
~CS_Engine is a piece of geometry that will not render in the game and it's pivot serves as the position to show the prop. The prop is a part added by the sim and not modeled within a new model.
It is possible to model your own propellers but they are imported into RealFlight as a separate file to be used on any aircraft you choose.

Pivots for the model must be correct to Real Flights expectations with the model facing to positive Y axis and Z up. Pivots can have some rotation on any axis as in the case of ailerons on a dihedral wing or even swept back.
You will need 3ds max or Blender to allow for precise pivot alignment. Fusion360 will not work for this purpose.

Heirarchy or Parenting Is a process of linking objects in a specific rank telling RealFlight how you want the model and it's parts to follow one another within the sim.
Again you will need 3ds Max or Blender to properly set this property of your model.

Exporting as FBX has a few settings to be successful.

Smoothing Groups
Units - Automatic
FBX version 2014/2015

Uncheck
TurboSmooth
Split per-vertex Normals

Because of these settings I am not sure if Blender exports 100% correctly. Someone familiar with Blender could comment to that.

Textures:
Diffuse texture or main color map can be named whatever you wish and must be saved as a .TGA up to 32bit works well and RLE compression also works. Example: QuadAwesomeCS.tga
The next two texture maps are not required but improve the models visual impact
All maps must be multiples of 256 and square but each map can have different resolutions
Normal Map must have the same name as the diffuse texture with _n suffix Example: QuadAwesomeCS_n.tga
Specular Map also must have the same name as the diffuse texture with _s suffix Example: QuadAwesomCS_s.tga
These textures must be in the same folder as the .FBX file for import into RealFlight
 
Last edited:
Wow, That's a very in depth explanation, thank you!

Having not used 3ds max I have a question, I can import model files from other cad programs like Solidworks/Fusion 360 into 3dsmax. If I model all the parts separately can I import them all into the same workspace?

I'll have a play around and see if I can get *something* imported before I make it work properly
 
Boof69 said:
An attached texture is a necessity for importing into real flight. It can be a solid color and must be square divisible by 256.
So 256x256...512x512 and so on. with 4096x4096 being the largest for most models.
It calls it a kex because the import process converts your fbx to a .kex and it errors out because of the missing texture.
Proper naming is also expected. ~CS_ is a prefix to consider a part individual and breakable. Unnamed parts will be considered a part of it's parent changing the parent's shape in the editor.
The exception to the prefix rule is "Fuselage" It is the root frame therefore is automatically considered individual and it is the parent of all other parts.
So with a multi rotor you will have a Fuselage parent to the number of arms each of which will be named ~CS_Tailboom1 through the total number of arms present. Those will be parent to their own corresponding ~CS_EnginePivot and finally as children of the EnginePivot you have ~CS_Spinner and ~CS_Engine each of which will have the same number suffix as the tailboom they belong to.
the part of your model that will visually rotate will be your ~CS_Spinner objects. E.g. motor bells and prop nuts
~CS_Engine is a piece of geometry that will not render in the game and it's pivot serves as the position to show the prop. The prop is a part added by the sim and not modeled within a new model.
It is possible to model your own propellers but they are imported into RealFlight as a separate file to be used on any aircraft you choose.

Pivots for the model must be correct to Real Flights expectations with the model facing to positive Y axis and Z up. Pivots can have some rotation on any axis as in the case of ailerons on a dihedral wing or even swept back.
You will need 3ds max or Blender to allow for precise pivot alignment. Fusion360 will not work for this purpose.

Heirarchy or Parenting Is a process of linking objects in a specific rank telling RealFlight how you want the model and it's parts to follow one another within the sim.
Again you will need 3ds Max or Blender to properly set this property of your model.

Exporting as FBX has a few settings to be successful.

Smoothing Groups
Units - Automatic
FBX version 2014/2015

Uncheck
TurboSmooth
Split per-vertex Normals

Because of these settings I am not sure if Blender exports 100% correctly. Someone familiar with Blender could comment to that.

Textures:
Diffuse texture or main color map can be named whatever you wish and must be saved as a .TGA up to 32bit works well and RLE compression also works. Example: QuadAwesomeCS.tga
The next two texture maps are not required but improve the models visual impact
All maps must be multiples of 256 and square but each map can have different resolutions
Normal Map must have the same name as the diffuse texture with _n suffix Example: QuadAwesomeCS_n.tga
Specular Map also must have the same name as the diffuse texture with _s suffix Example: QuadAwesomCS_s.tga
These textures must be in the same folder as the .FBX file for import into RealFlight
Click to expand...

Ok, I get to the point the model imports from 3dsmax but get this error and then it looks like the selected reference model not mine.
1589468571519.png

This is my hierarchy in 3dsMax:
1589468654419.png

Anything obvious Im missing?
 
Those errors should clear up as you re-create the physics for your model. Unless all of your parts are named exactly as the reference model's you will get errors. Have you any experience with the RealFlight editor?
 
Boof69 said:
Those errors should clear up as you re-create the physics for your model. Unless all of your parts are named exactly as the reference model's you will get errors. Have you any experience with the RealFlight editor?
Click to expand...
I will continue then, it crashes on its first attempt at loading, and then uses the wrong texture. I haven't and couldn't find a working kex file to import and then play with only rfx
 
I'm confused by the kex file statement. You should import an fbx and that's it. Go through the import process and then select it from the list of custom aircraft and it will generate a .dds texture. It should fly exactly as the reference aircraft because the physics are not yet customized to your model.
 
It gets even more confusing. Once I load it in and go to aircraft editor all the names don't match the ones in the fbx I'm importing, and the linked to component just shows the reference aircraft's names not mine. I can upload a copy of my files if you want to have a look?
 
Do you have collision mesh on the model, I had a problem with dimensions displayed being incorrect without collision mesh on the wings
 
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