OK, I found this link which did the trick Create custom model for SITL - #22 by Fatih_Ozkan
A second question :
I noticed there are .sdf.jinja and sdf.last_generated in the model directories as well. however, when I removed them, now the model is not loaded saying model cant be found. are these not supposed to be generated on the fly during px4 build? if so why am I getting this error?
How am I supposed to force their regeneration?
Whats wrong here? any help in this is greatly appreciated