Tony Peden wrote: > BTW, you will rarely see the c.g. used as a reference point for > dimensions on aircraft. First of all, it moves in flight. Second of > all, it's very difficult to actually point to its location.
That's my intuition too. David is correct, though, that most lightplane POH's use a nominal center of gravity as the origin for their weight & balance tables. The front seat is N meters in front, the fuel tank is M meters behind, etc... But still, the goal here is to make communication between 3D artists and aero modellers easy, not necessarily to adhere to pre-existing conventions. An artist using Blender is much more likely to be working from a 3-view or a photograph; the c.g. isn't marked on these. Picking an easily recognized spot on the airframe seems like the best convention. Whether that be the nose or not, I don't much care. Other good choices would be the nose gear base, wing root, tail, top of the vertical stabilizer, etc... The nose seemed straightforward to me. In this case, the simplest solution is to bring up the 747 model in a (registered) copy of AC3D, drag it around so the nose tip lies exactly on the origin, and save it. I can do all but the last step. :) Andy -- Andrew J. Ross NextBus Information Systems Senior Software Engineer Emeryville, CA [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.nextbus.com "Men go crazy in conflagrations. They only get better one by one." - Sting (misquoted) _______________________________________________ Flightgear-devel mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mail.flightgear.org/mailman/listinfo/flightgear-devel
