How To: Modifying Default Aircraft

The aircraft that come with YSFlight are not completely accurate, lacking transparent canopies, pilots and proper landing gear.

The aircraft can be quickly modified to make them look better.

1. Copy the aircraft files into folder user/yourmods under your user name and make sure the model loads as it is.

2. Import the aircraft .dnm into Blender 2.49b and export as .lwo

3. Select the vertices or edges of the canopy and move the canopy down into the cockpit, close to the floor. It may be necessary to create additional edges to do this.

4. Decide on a color scheme for the aircraft

5. Color the cockpit area

6. Import the pilot and seat, color the pilot and seat

7. Combine parts of the aircraft - fuselage - into one object

8. Create and install landing gear in place, each gear as one object

9. Export the .lwo into Blender and again combine and rename objects - combine each landing gear set and fuselage parts

10. Export as .dnm and check in .dnm viewer and also in YSFlight

11. Create the canopy frame and install it.

12. Create the canopy transparencies and install them. Recolor canopy from bright blue to grey.

13. Make the landing gear disappear on retraction as a work around

*Create a new canopy by fashioning a block according to the 3 view of the aircraft. The canopy should not have too many sides, a polygon shape of 10 faces is good. Too may faces will make transparency difficult to achieve.

* It might be better to create the canopy frame separately and attach 'glass' panels or none at all.

Performance modifications are carried out separately

5 July 2022