SceneryDesign.org To get a better understanding of how you are using the ModelConverterX tool I have setup a survey. So if you are using ModelConverterX, I would appreciate it if you spend some time to answer those questions. Knowing which functionality, importers and exporters matter most to you, helps me to make the tool even more […]
Drawcall minimizer in next development release
Just a quick note that the drawcall minimizer functionality of ModelConverterX will be available in the next development release (in a few hours). Please let me know if there are any bugs or issues.
Drawcall minimizer
Today I have been working on the drawcall minimizer and it is going quite well. For the diffuse textures I can now reduce the amount of textures by combining them onto one texture sheet, after which the texture mapping is updated automatically on the model. The biggest problem with this approach is that other textures […]
Jetlag almost gone
We are back home for a few days now, after enjoying a two week vacation in California. We had a lot of fun there and now that the jetlag is almost gone, it is time to spend some time on my FS tools again. Initially I plan to focus on ModelConverterX a bit more. I […]
Minimize drawcall functionality
One of the challenges when converting old API macros or COLLADA objects is often how to make them framerate friendly. It is not uncommon for such objects to use many small texture files. If you for example load an object from the Google 3D warehouse, don’t be surprised to find it uses 40 different texture […]
Mass Texture Editor
To assist with the conversion of textures while converting objects for us in FS, I have added a new tool to ModelconverterX. It is called the Mass Texture Editor tool and it will help you to rename, resize and convert to another format all the textures of an object at once. So this will be […]
Modelling for FSX using Sketchup
One of the topics that is discussed often lately on the FSDeveloper forums is using Sketchup to model for FSX. The good news for those of you who think that the learning curve of GMax is a bit too steep, is that you can use Sketchup as well if you want to model some scenery […]
Texture conversions
In the last days there has been a lot of discussion on the FSDeveloper forum about converting COLLADA objects for use in FSX. One of the issues the users are facing is that many COLLADA models use textures in formats that FSX can not read, for example JPG files. So there is clearly a need […]
ModelConverterX and LODs
It’s a little bit ironic, after all the effort I put in the LOD Creator functionality of ModelConverterX. But today I found out that the LODs were not really working in FSX SP2 when you exported the FSX MDL files. This is because of the drawcall batching functionality that I wrote about in the previous […]
LODs versus drawcall batching
Since MS introduced the concept of drawcall batching in SP2 of FSX there has been a lot of discussion going on about levels of details still working or not. In the end it comes down to a choice between either having LODs working for your object or having drawcall batching. The MDL files that the […]