Pushback Truck (towbar and towbarless)

[HHS81]

The Dornier 328Jet don't have the ability to pushback on its own like the Dornier328Prop.
I found a image on airliners.net, which shows how a Dornier 328Jet is pulled by a Towbarless Pushback truck Goldhofer-Schopf AST-3.

• create 3d-model of AST-3, and a smaller Towbar truck

• animate pushback, with simulation of lifting the nosegear by using the collision (HOT) feature
  EDIT: collision (HOT) feature broken in 2018.1

[ghost]

For the smaller towbar truck, you might want to use the model FlorianK created for the Q400: https://github.com/D-ECHO/Q400-jsb/tree/master/Models/Pushback

[HHS81]

Thanks, D-ECHO, the model looks great!

[xcvb85]

@D-ECHO: Nice one!

I re-calculated the ambient-occlusion shadows (I know Heiko doesn't like them but the quality is at least better than before) and I added the glas shaders from the aircraft.

@HHS81: I can upload it if you like.

[xcvb85]

I read some articles about lightning. Ambient occlusion are the shadows from diffuse light. Since there is always diffuse light (even at a cloudy day the street under a parked car is darker) it would be unrealistic not to have ambient occlusion. The question is if they should be be pre-rendered or if this should be done in shaders (Rembrandt). And of course too much effect is as bad as not to have it.

[HHS81]

@xcvb85
I hope you also read that Ambient Occlusion is physically NOT corrcect and just a very cheap approximation.
EDIT: "...which simulates soft global illumination shadows by faking darkness perceived in corners and at mesh intersections, creases, and cracks, where ambient light is occluded, or blocked.
There is no such thing as AO in real life; AO is a specific not-physically-accurate (but generally nice-looking) rendering trick."
https://docs.blender.org/manual/en/dev/render/blender_render/world/ambient_occlusion.html

I have never been against Ambient Occlusion itself, but things have changed a lot since Ambient Occlusion technic as you used here had been introduced into FlightGear. That was the time where Blender only had its internal renderer, and photo-realistic-rendering needed hours to complete.

Now we have Blender Cycles, and with this it is much easier to get realistic baked textures.
What I already did on the Fuselage textures, and in the Cessna 182S cockpit, is a more realistic baking of the shading map in Blender via Cycles. That means: I added a realistic lightsource (sun with high shadow radius to simulate a cloudy sky) and a ground, and I defined realistic materials settings, and only a very little amount of AO for the external 3d-model. For the interior I added some area lamps at the windows just to get a faster denoised output. At the end you get a more natural and realistic shading. It is more than simply Ambient Occlusion. That's why I don't like simply pressing the "AO"-button anymore, then with only little effort you can get much better shading.

"Rembrandt" itself is dead, and the AO in Rembrandt much too much overdone.