What is the best workflow to create external rivets?

User Support Hub SDK
,
1

Hello! I am a beginner developper and I want to make sure I am doing my models the right way. I was wondering what are the best practices to model the external details of an aircraft (principally rivets/screws, also in relation with liveries).

  • From what I understand, usually the aircraft’s rivets are basically 2D squares with a screw texture on them, put around the model. Are these squares perfectly on the surface of the mesh, or are they shifted, and if so, of how much?

  • How do you handle LOD’s on all these rivets? As there is basically no way to diminish the poly count of these squares? Do they simply disappear from a certain distance?

  • When you create liveries do you simply change the color of the rivets accordingly?

  • I haven’t started playing with the SDK yet, but is there a was to apply a “miror” modifier on these screws to save ressources?

  • Is it possible (and better?) to put all these rivets as instances to save resources? Or do you have a single mesh with all the rivets?

  • Are the rest of the external color details made the same way?

2

Have you taken a look in the SDK documentations?
In 2020, the preferred method was to use decals for rivets and screws, which, in turn, were painted by a livery decal. so you map all your rivets to one texture and the livery decal does the rest for you. See here.

2024 with its submodel merging approach works slightly different (even though the above mentioned method still works), which you can read up in the 2024 SDK docs.

I’m no 3D-modeller in MSFS, so I can only point there, not assist by trying.

3

Thank you, I red it again and yes I understand better, but I still dont know if LODs apply to decals

4

I think that depends on the plane you’re creating. The larger, the sooner the vertices on the rivet polys should disappear. You could try and look into the 2020 (!) base edition airplanes and their different LODs using the MSFS2blend2MSFS plugin for Blender.