Month: March 2010

I made my last blog post at the beginning of March and now it seems the month is almost over already. Where did all that time go? I guess it is partly because it has been quite a busy month at work and I also spend some time on finally finishing our wedding photo album. But there is also some progress on FS related issues. I have slowly been working on ModelConverterX, mainly looking at the drawcall minimizer. And it seems just the other day some issue appeared concerning the materials in the FSX MDL format. I am looking into … Continue reading Where did March go?

I have made a little demonstration video that shows how you can use the drawcall minimzer. In this video I will be converting a KMZ file to a MDL file. In that process I am using the mass texture editor and the drawcall minimizer to make sure the textures end up as efficient as possible. In this case I could reduce the amount of drawcalls from 45 to 6. Enjoy the video and if you still have questions about the functionality please ask them on the forum (in the absense of a manual).

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 useful in the future. For example I have some ideas to change the GUI so that information is presented more clear. But to know if this would really help, I would like to have a better understand if you are normally running ModelConverterX full screen … Continue reading ModelConverterX usage survey

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.

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 (like night textures) are not updated yet at the moment. And also I would like to add the functionality to put the colours into the texture sheet as well to minimize the amount of drawcalls further. But if I can’t fix those issues quickly, I … Continue reading Drawcall minimizer

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 want to finish the function to minimize drawcalls and will try to fix some bugs in the COLLADA reader. Since my posts about using Sketchup it seems many people give it a try, and they find many new bugs as well. After that I want … Continue reading Jetlag almost gone