Ravenfield

Ravenfield

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Kbar's small guide to Vtols
By kbarwich66
This is a small guide aimed at anyone interested in spicing up their planes with vertical takeoff and landing capabilities.
This guide only goes over the actual vtol parts and only tangentially over the normal setup of planes in general
   
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Introduction
This is a basic guide on how to make vtols out of ravenfield planes. While it is not exactly hard to get to work if one knows how it works, that knowledge seems to not be spread too far.
In this guide i'm using Blender version 4.0 and Unity 2020.3.18f1
The Steps should be the same, regardless of used versions
Blender Setup
The setup in Blender is very simple. The only part required aside from the "normal" parts of the plane you plan to make, is a singular empty object. For the example vtol, I've gone with plain axis, though any form of object even with mesh components works aswell. I have also created a swivelling engine so that we can see, whether we're in vtol or flight mode later. the engine is set as a child of the empty object created before.
We can then animate our empty object, here Thruster_Base. Basically we want two states and a transition between the two. The First State has the thruster angled downwards, the second backwards (first as seen below, second as seen above). I reccomend tilting the empty object 65-85
degrees downward rather then full 90
Unity Setup
The Unity setup goes much like usual. The difference here is, that we have our thruster as the child of the animated object from before
We can use the normal setup for a landing gear animator, that can also be found on the default plane.
If the thruster is a child of the animated object, it should then tilt, when the landing gear variable is set to false. Thus the direction of accelleration changes, making it so that our plane goes from rising to flying.
It is usually necessary to set the graphs for "lift vs angle of attack" and "control vs angle of attack" to be a constant 1 rather then the usual diminished values at non-standard angles. Additionallly you should tweak around with the accelleration and drag values, so that the switching of the landing gear becomes easier.
Known Issues
One issue with this method of doing vtols is, that you always depend on the RF-Logic for determining, when the landing gear is switched. There may be other ways if for example you use a custom keybind to toggle the landing gear manually with a mutator, but this should be the most accessible and easiest way to do it