SceneryDesign.org 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 […]
ModelConverterX tutorial on Wiki
The ModelConverterX tutorial I gave this evening on the FSDeveloper LiveStream channel, has also been uploaded to the Wiki now. So on both of these places you can now review this tutorial. Unfortunately I had a few bandwidth problems while recording the tutorial, so I had to restart two times. Sorry for the inconvenience for […]
ModelConverterX video tutorial
Just a little reminder that in two days there will be an online video tutorial about ModelConverterX. I think tutorial I will give a quick introduction to the tool and after that I will show how you can use it to convert old API macros into FSX MDL files or how to import them into […]
Day or night?
Tonight I have added a nice little feature to ModelConverterX again (it will be in the 1.2 development release tomorrow). You might wonder what it is? You can now choose to render your object in day or night view. The night view allows you to preview the night textures. Here is a little screenshot of […]