Month: November 2009

Today I got a question about the size of an addon aircraft in the preview window in FS, it was appearing too small. If I knew a solution? Actually I did and I had discussed it before with some other aircraft designers. The preview size is determined by the radius within the MDL file, but unfortunately there was no easy way to edit this (unless you like to attack the MDL file wit your hex editor). I have now made a small tool that allows you to tweak the radius and bounding box values of a MDL file. Enjoy and … Continue reading RADItor

Today I stumbled upon this new tool by Google: Building Maker. It is quite impressive to see how with a few mouse clicks you can make a 3D model using images showing the object from different angles. I guess this way of constructing would be the dream of many FS developers as well. [View:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JI6wVtCY99E:800:0] I did try the tool for a simple office building and that worked quite good, but I am not sure how easy it is with irregular shapes. I guess it is mainly suitable for objects that don’t need too much detail and mainly rely on their … Continue reading Google Building Maker

As a little bonus feature on top of the COLLADA reader I added yesterday, I have now also added a KMZ reader. KMZ is the file format used by Google Earth for its objects and basically it is a ZIP file containing the COLLADA file for the object and all the texture used all in one. Below is a little screenshot of this reader in action. I took this cottage object from the Google Sketchup Warehouse to test if the reader is working fine and as you can see it is.

The COLLADA reader for ModelConverterX, that I talked about in the previous post, will be available in the development release from tomorrow. The reader can read the geometries and materials used by the objects. At the moment transformations and animations are not yet supported. Below is another screenshot of the duck test object, now with the texture applied correctly. I have tested it with some of the COLLADA sample objects and with some Sketchup output and the reader seems quite robust. But since this is just the first version of the COLLADA reader I would not be surprised if some … Continue reading COLLADA reader available

Last I week I gave Google Sketchup another try and it seems a program you can learn to use quite quickly. If you compare it with GMax I think it has a learning curve that is much less steep. And I think if you model carefully in Sketchup you can make models with it that are suitable for real time rendering. So I think that for some people who just want to make some simple objects Sketchup might be a nice alternative. But how to get those objects into FS? The free version of Sketchup only exports KMZ and DAE … Continue reading COLLADA reader

Time for a little update. This weekend was the annual FSWeekend in the Netherlands again, and I was present there on behalf of NL2000 and FSDeveloper. For NL2000 this was certainly not the first time we were there and it was a lot of fun to meet all those users of our scenery again. There are people you see almost every year at the weekend. For FSDeveloper it was the first time we were (a bit) visible at the event. Due to the more technical nature of the FSDeveloper community there was maybe a little less interest, but hopefully it … Continue reading FSWeekend 2009