Hello everyone,
I want to share the progress with AAMs projects for Jane's Fighter Anthology. It have been very humbling journey and I am still learnig about working with SH. I still have more to learn.
I began working on AIM-9B overhaul projects, which lead me into working on building AAMs package. Then eventually i decided I wanted to work on AIM-4 and AIM-26. I am big fans of early era of AAMs from late 1940s to 1970s, where they were quite challenging to use and requires skills and lucks to achieve air to air victories.
I made many mistakes, learned several lessons, re-worked on AAMs from ground up over and over until I get all right. There are still time when glitches happens, it can not be helped. SH files are an ancient file that requires deep learning curves to understand how it work. WIth the supports of Terrance's OpenFA and Plurry knowledge, I do my best working with SH files. I chose PL-7 as base SH to modify it into different AAMs because it offers what I seeked for.
When I built first version of AIM-4 and released the testing version, the fact hit me the hardest; I forgot to scale it with other objects! When I first built AIM-4 series, I realized it was too big to be accurate AIM-4s, then I had to re-work on all AIM-4s pack then used my best ability to compare AIM-4s to photo of AIM-4 being mounted on F-4. I did the same with AIM-9B, then set my standard measure in vertexes for various AAMs.
Here is screenshot, you can see how AIM-4 was too big:
Then after re-working and re-scaling AIM-4s, they started to look more accurate:
I could not make it smaller without sacrificing the quality looks of AIM-4s. Since Jane's FA only use one whole number, so there is no 0.5, 1.25, etc. There is only 1,2, 5, etc. I did my best to make they look realistic.
By going this road, I am able to build AIM-4A (GAR-1 and GAR-1D), along with C, D, E, F, and G variants of AIM-4s:
The export versions of AIM-4s was created too:
After working with AIM-4s, used an existing AIM-4s shapes to turn them into AIM-26s:
The beta version of AIM-4s and AIM-26s pack is released in our discord channel. It is my goal to further improve AIM-4s and AIM-26s while working on the next early era AAMs.
Eagle114th