MSFS animated Windsock Tutorial - How to make with Blender - Game Ready with Armature

In this tutorial we are going to make an animated windsock that will turn according to the wind direction and will have several animation for each wind strenght
The animation is made using Armature with bones in Blender, so the object is game ready also for other games (e.g. export to unity)
00:00 Overview
00:40 Windsock Specifications
01:55 3D Modelling
10:30 Adding the armature
12:35 Adding the Bones
17:05 weight painting
19:34 making the First bone animation
23:30 animated the Bones for all Wind strenghts
26:34 Add Default_State
27:59 animate Wind direction
30:00 model exporter
32:00 Simobject Setup
34:02 Setting up model.xml
40:00 compiling
40:55 final result in the sim
discord channel:
/ discord
my work on flightsim.to with donation link
flightsim.to/profile/mamu82/u...

[@tesladriverroa8103]

Thank you for your excellent Tutorials, Federico! As a beginner in Blender and MSFS SDK, I learned all that in two weeks. See my work soon in "my" airport ED31 (LCAO).

[@MSFS-SDK-TUTORIALS]

Glad to be helpful!! Looking forward to try that!

[@jamilzeira82]

As always your tutorials are amazing, very well explained and easy to understand. thanks.

[@MSFS-SDK-TUTORIALS]

Thanks Jamil, as a non native english speaker your kind comment means a lot to me!

[@BillWomack]

Great tutorial! Thanks for posting.

[@connomar55]

Fantastic Federico. Just what I needed to understand the process.

[@Legoluke44]

Thanks for your awesome tutorials man! Keep it up :)

[@myphysicalworld3958]

Nice Job, Buddy! Keep up the good work!

[@neth77]

Awesome thanks

[@FactoriadeDrones]

wow your tutorials are mindblowing just thanks !

[@jsalm194]

Many thanks. I have learned a lot with this tutorial.

[@brandonthetford2355]

Your tutorials are excellent and this is one of the things I have wanted to do but I have not tried yet. I will be doing this with my new project though and you just saved people from a whole lot of stress. I appreciate so much these tutorials. Thank you!

[@Eichetheking]

Thank you!! Mille grazie! Finally managed to make my own windsock!

[@airpilotmd80]

I was looking for this tutorial from a long time ,thanks

[@MSFS-SDK-TUTORIALS]

Thanks you su much! Yeahh I'm pretty sure is the only one 😄. And i know why, took 3 days to make and edit, and lot of patience, doing something could be easy for some people, but (trying to) explain it Is a whole different story 🤓

[@LooterUniverse]

Thanking you for your series, Frederico. I just spent two days working out the bones elements in blender to create my own flag that I can size up and down etc for my airport. I wanted one that just flys independently of the wind and one that was not a simobject so I could size it up and down. I finally worked it all out around 12Hours ago after days of experiemting and testing. And now you post this. LOL. I should have waited. Excellent work. At least I have something to go back to, to refine my workflows and use with future objects, especially simobjects. Great work, and great channel. Good Luck.

[@MSFS-SDK-TUTORIALS]

Thanks and can congratulations for your flag, Is a big achievement, I have done mine last year and I still feel the pain of all that bone constrain 😆

[@johnarnold7460]

Bravo!

[@lukapretegiani3348]

grazzie di cuore!!!

[@elgalopinos]

Great tutorial Federico, I also learn lot of things on how to work with Blender. Of course I am going to try to make one, once I finish with my airport project, phase 1... This tutorial I think will help me a lot on how to make the flag, following the tutorial om windy things. Thank you very much for sharing your works

[@MSFS-SDK-TUTORIALS]

Thanks Rafael, actually the "windy things" use a different workflow (the One I called "automatic"), wich Is the only that can make a realistic flag movement, but Is a bit difficult for beginners 😌

[@albertomanueloliveiraloayz2247]

You are the best.

[@jonraines9010]

Federico, thanks so much for this. I'm a little late to the party on making my own windsock. I'm stuck at the weight paint portion because although i've disabled "front face only", i'm only able to paint the portion that I'm looking at in the view port. It makes everything uneven!

[@MSFS-SDK-TUTORIALS]

Hey Jon, did you set the falloff to projected too?

[@rd4127]

plese make a video teaching how to make jetways, it will help a lot, and thank you very much for your videos, they helped me a lot :)

[@MSFS-SDK-TUTORIALS]

If I survive Sim Update 9, maybe i can think about them, at least because they are challenging. But if you are not in a hurry Better wait for official shipment of the Blender Exporter in official sdk, there Will be hopefully a jetway Blender sample

[@rd4127]

@@MSFS-SDK-TUTORIALS perfect, thanks my friend !

[@LataVoadora]

Thanks for yet another beautiful tutorial. I'm learning a lot from your videos. Would it be possible to have a tutorial on how to create flags in Blender for MSFS?

[@MSFS-SDK-TUTORIALS]

I have a lot of requests for the flag tutorial, eventually I will end up doing that, but I have a few other topics waiting and I need su10 to be out to continue with my series (to avoid spreading possibly outdated info!)

[@walkgeo]

Well done FYI the pole would be the safety red as well.

[@levorhuck2346]

Very good and interesting tutorial, thank you. However - i wanted to try this right away - using blender 3.1.2 - using the new asobo exporter (like in your video). The only thing i've changed is, that i wasn't using a windsock model, i've just created a simple box, stretched it like a long box, to be able to add a few bones and bend it. So i did all the steps (again, except i was only using one bone animation, together with the orientation and the default_state anim, so 3 anims at the end). After doing everything like in your video, at the end i've exported this object with animation - so 3 files (.bin, gltf and xml) got created. Testing it in Windows 3D viewer, the objects appear, 3 anims are listed. the default_state not moving, the orientation rotating 360 deg - but the anim of the stretched long box (like a snake) didn't move, it was just stuck in the all cleared transformation horizontal position (the same like the default_state) and not moving ?? Very odd, since i can't recall doing anything different from your video (slowly step by step - except of doing just 1 bone-anim instead of your 6 bone-anims) ... i've heard off "baking an animation", but in your video this doesn't seem to be necessary to do ...

[@MSFS-SDK-TUTORIALS]

If you can join me on discord and send the Blend file i can take a look at your work 😉 Baking Is used when the animation Is not driven by keyframes (like Path/curve animations or animation with constrains like Copy location/rotation)

[@Arraxxon]

@@MSFS-SDK-TUTORIALS Thank you for fast reply and help ! 1000 thumbs up ... if i could ;)

[@3138dan]

Thanks for your great tutorials! :) Any chance you can do a custom animated jetway tutorial in blender and how to correctly export to MSFS? Have a nice day ;)

[@MSFS-SDK-TUTORIALS]

Thanks little hedgehog, i'm not excluding doing jetways, but i'm pretty confident that as soon as Asobo Will official ship the Blender Exporter with the SDK, also the sample Will be in Blender format, and because they have a jetway sample, pretty much everyone Will be able to do them without much hassle 🤓

[@steffenhustveit]

Hi! Thanks for a great tutorial =) Ive finish the sock, but its blowing the wrong direction. Have I missed someting? The stock simobject sock is blowing the correct way. Kind regards

[@MSFS-SDK-TUTORIALS]

If you are the one on fsdeveloper you should have solved by now Otherwise send me a DM on discord and will make it out!

[@steffenhustveit]

@@MSFS-SDK-TUTORIALS Yes thank you. It’s me on the fsdev. Not sure what I did wrong but it had something to do with the rotation and maybe it was not on 0 degrees when I started. Anyway, it works and thank you for great tutorial. Now il try flags! Wish me luck ^^)

[@konturgestalter]

Could you make a video showing an example of how you interact with scenery objects? e.g. When I press a button in a plane, a light switches on on a building. I just would like to learn how to interact with elements in the world.

[@MSFS-SDK-TUTORIALS]

Well this is exactly what you are looking for 😗 kzbin.info/www/bejne/e5-Xp5-Zpq6lba8

[@coyotekid57]

Great tutorial Federico, however, after following it for turning my Windmill Scenery model into the wind, it does not seem to work?? Could it be because... 1: it's not a SimObject? 2: it's not near an Airfield? 3: Or another reason? Hope you can give me a little hint about my problem. Thanks.

[@MSFS-SDK-TUTORIALS]

Hi Dave, it must be a Simboject!! Only Simbojects can interact with sim data (wind direction in this case)

[@coyotekid57]

@@MSFS-SDK-TUTORIALS Thanks for your speeedy responce. I was afraid it might be that, so have to do some more work ;-) Thanks again.

[@Jimbo-in-Thailand]

👍👍 Another great tutorial Federico! Do you know why SimObjects are not scalable in MSFS? I ask because I use the excellent _tsr-windy-things_ flags and windsocks in my scenery and quickly found that I can't scale them. In fact, they do immediately scale by changing the value in Gizmo, but the new scale reverts back to default as soon as I build the package. 😭

[@MSFS-SDK-TUTORIALS]

Thanks Jimbo! Yep you can scale Simobject, has been a default behaviour since the sim release. However could be possible that with su10 they will fix the issue devsupport.flightsimulator.com/questions/7631/jetway-scale-doesnt-work-12570.html

[@andreosiecki]

I´ve got some errors when exporting. How i could know how solve this?

[@MSFS-SDK-TUTORIALS]

If you don't mind to share the errors blender or the console is throwing, we can try to help discord.gg/kfMUZza8

[@andreosiecki]

@@MSFS-SDK-TUTORIALS thank you, man! I´ll share with you. Thanks for your awesome channel and tutorials. Have a nice day!

[@patrickcfss7548]

Getting an Error regarding neutral bones. Has this ever come up for you?

[@MSFS-SDK-TUTORIALS]

Hi Patrick, in the exporter options there is a checkbox called "Use Asobo unique_id" Uncheck it and the error will go away

[@patrickcfss7548]

@@MSFS-SDK-TUTORIALSThank you. It worked

[@eraldosammurierasam9913]

How did you import the MSFS standard Windsock model into blender ?

[@MSFS-SDK-TUTORIALS]

File -> Import -> glTF But don't expect to import and MODIFY a bone animated Object, It Will screw up

[@eraldosammurierasam9913]

@@MSFS-SDK-TUTORIALS thanks, actually I was wondering if there was another smarter option

[@MSFS-SDK-TUTORIALS]

@@eraldosammurierasam9913 smarter at doing what? There are ways to copy animations between different armatures (It Is called retargeting) but takes more time than creating the stuff from scratch Once you get used to them, takes Little time to do If you want a collection of already made Windsock search for windy things on flightsim.to 😉