Month: June 2010

Over the last days I worked on the ModelConverterX LOD Creator tool. My first aim was to add another algorithm to calculate the LODs. And besides that I also improved the user interface a bit. On the right you see a screenshot of the new user interface and since the manual is not yet updated, I will give a brief overview of the changes here. The selection box at the top right allows you to choose between the different algorithms that are available. At the moment you can choose either vertex clustering or quadratic based error. The last one is … Continue reading Improved LOD Creator functionality

Ever since I started making scenery for Flight Simulator, you could get almost any tool you wanted using scenery.org. That site provided a great overview of tools and tutorials for scenery designers. Sadly last week the site went offline. This did not come as a huge surprise, since the owner Tom Gregor had already indicated before that running the site was becoming to expensive. After this message the FSDeveloper admins already contacted Tom Gregor to see if we assist in some way. We do have his permission to keep the tools and tutorials alive on FSDeveloper and we also have … Continue reading scenery.org

An often occurring problem when designing scenery is that your object shows with black (or no) textures. There can be many causes for this. For example a  texture that is not a power of two in size, a texture that is in the 24 bit BMP format that FS can not read or just a texture that you forgot to copy to the right texture folder. Recently I discovered another reason for black textures (and this one took me a little while to figure out). When you apply a bump map to a material, but the polygons that use the … Continue reading Black textures

For quite some time already ModelConverterX has the functionality to attach things to your object. For example an effect or another library object. I mainly used this to attach lights to objects and since these shine in any direction I never really bothered to check the orientation properly. Until there were some questions about this on the forum recently. So I took a look and found out the orientation was not really correct. So in the latest development release of ModelConverterX this has been fixed. The orientation of attached objects is now exported correctly. I have also changed how attached … Continue reading Attached object orientation

Today I was experimenting a bit with using normal maps and bump maps in gPoly. So this meant I had to make some bump maps and while doing so it bothered me again that you have to transform the output of the normalmap plugins to work correctly in FSX. Maybe it is my GIMP skills, but I never find it easy to swap channels and do tasks like that in GIMP. So I decided to add a functionality to ModelConverterX that does all the work for you. You just load the output of the normalmap plugin and it will create … Continue reading Normal maps for FSX