First attempt at a movie

[G-BVOB]

I thought I'd have a go at filming a test flight on the F-27 last night. I should have left it to the kids, they'd have done it in a tenth of the time 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s0JqfSbPh14

Shots of a circuit at Rockhampton, Queensland. More work needed to tweak the visuals, but the main thing is it works and I can finally have some fun flying rather than building.

Cheers
Jon
www.g-bvob.net

[Bob Reed]

Looks great. What is the setup on the visuals?

[MLeavy737]

Nice work!  The cool factor is way up there!

Mike Leavy

[G-BVOB]

Thanks guys. Bob the setup's been cobbled together using tried and tested methods found on the internet and this site - thanks everyone, especially Ivar Hestnes who gave me the original inspiration looking at his website.

3 Acer X1230S short throw projectors (cheap but effective!) are mounted in the roof on beams spanning the garage. A complication with the real fuselage is that everything is higher than would be normal with a home cockpit, the cockpit floor is about 3 1/2 foot above garage floor level. That gives issues with unobstructed clearance for the projectors over the cockpit roof. Two computers drive the visuals - an overclocked i5 2500 runs the forward and left views, with an older i7 running the right view. Hooked up with Wideview to a dual-core PIII which runs the aircraft and instrumentation. I'm experimenting with Widetraffic, but can't get it to work, which is a shame as Wideviw itself runs perfectly.

I'm using Fly Elise-NG software to correct for the curved screen. Screen radius is about 2.4 metres, hardboard screwed on a wood frame. At the moment it's covered with white ceiling paint, but I'd like to try some projector paint - we have it in our new offices and the picture brightness is significantly improved. Cost of that paint is the big issue though! The one downside to having the original cockpit windows is that they do dull the outside view slightly.

Next job's to try and hook up to VATSIM and get some flying in as the build continues.
Jon

Actually next job's to touch up the white paint on the screen, I've just spend 5 minutes trying to get a bird out of the garage, ordinary ceiling paint on hardboard doesn't wipe totally clean with bird c**p

[Drewsta]

Wow! I love it, as crazy as this may seem, I loved looking through the dirty windcreen , kinda made it look more realistic:) Are your graphics really that sharp or are they alittle blurry up close  (1280x800) . Im running FS9 and your on FSX  that may be a difference.

Drew

[G-BVOB]

Drew,

Yes I think the windscreen glass does add something to the experience, it's a bit like the image improvement from putting smoked acrylic sheet over a TFT monitor behind an instrument panel. The only downside is that the projected image brightness is lessened looking through the thick cockpit glass.

As far as image sharpness goes it's of course nothing like the quality on a monitor, but I'm happy with the overall effect. If you stand outside the cockpit close up to the screen you can see the individual pixels, but inside the cockpit it's not so noticeable and you get used to it very quickly. I don't have much choice given the cockpit size but having seen large monitors and projector setups the gain in immersion from a projector more than offsets the loss in picture sharpness, and being inside an enclosure seems to provide a good feeling of depth to the image. I havn't tried this with FS9, I pretty much ditched it in favour of FSX a year ago, but I reckon the higher autogen density in FSX is a bonus when projecting a larger image.

Cheers
Jon