Month: July 2011

I still remember how this started. I had made a video tutorial about adding effects to an object using ModelConverterX. One of the remarks on that tutorial was like “he would it not be nice if we can see the actual effect in the preview as well?”. Well, why not I thought, it should be fun to try to render the effects as well. So from that moment on the idea was spinning around somewhere in the back of my head. I actually started coding it when I got back from vacation and after not that long I can render … Continue reading Special effects getting out of control!

I have updated the Object Information form of ModelConverterX. Besides rearranging the information a bit, you can now also see and edit the placement information of the object on the form. This means you can see the latitude, longitude, heading and scale the object is placed at. If there is no placement yet, you can use the “Add position” button to create one. At the moment only a few object readers will read placement information. So this information will be read only from the KMZ reader and from certain SCASM files. Also when exporting the placement information is not used by all … Continue reading Object Information form update

I have just released another update of ModelConverterX, this time the changes mainly affect how the user interface works. I have made the code more modular, so that it is easier for me to develop. But this also has a benefit for you as end user. With this new design you can keep all editors and windows open. So for example the Object Information Form, the Material Editor and a Scale Editor can all be open at the same time. Well, I hear you say, that is not really something new is it? I can do that in the old … Continue reading ModelConverterX user interface update

I have added a new object reader to ModelConverterX, this time for the X-Plane OBJ format. From tomorrow this new reader will be available in the development release. I don’t have an extensive collection of test objects in the X-Plane format yet, so it might be not all commands are properly supported yet. But the reader should support the following features: Reading geometry Reading LODs Reading animations Most of the material/appearance attributes Aircraft specific elements, like cockpit regions are not supported at the moment, since these can not be exported by ModelConverterX to any other format. If you find some … Continue reading X-Plane OBJ reader

The last two weeks I have on vacation, camping in Slovenia, but now I am back home again. I am still in the progress of cleaning, unpacking and storing all the camping stuff. But once that is done I hope to spend some time on flight sim things again. I have some cool features for ModelConverterX that I want to work on and of course I need to catch up with the FSDeveloper forum as well. So expect some more activity from me again in the next few days. The image below is lake Bled in Slovenia where we spend … Continue reading Back from Slovenia

I usually keep a list of bugs and features that I want to work on first for ModelConverterX. This is sort of my roadmap to the next stable release. But as it goes with a hobby project like this, sometimes the fun things push you away from the planned roadmap. Let me give you an example. Last week I made a video tutorial about placing effects using ModelConverterX. In some of the discussion that evolved after this a user, I won’t say it was you Bill, mentioned that it would be cool to have the actual effect also displayed in … Continue reading How to deviate from your roadmap…

There has been some discussion recently on the FSDeveloper forum about creating a place to discuss X-Plane related topics as well. We have now created a poll to see how much interest there is to discuss addon creation for different simulators. Let us know what you think. It is a long time ago that I looked at X-Plane myself, but I have been able to compare MSFS development with creating scenery for professional flight simulators (those that airliners use for their training). There are more similarities than you might expect at first. So I am sure that between FSX, X-Plane, … Continue reading FSDeveloper & X-Plane?

In the previous post I talked about specifying the crashbox granularity in XtoMDL. I have now added an option to ModelConverterX as well to do this. The picture below shows the Exporter settings of ModelConverterX. If you want to specify the crashbox granularity you need to do two things here: Set the option SetCrashboxGranularity to true, the default value is false which means the standard XtoMDL value is used Specify the granularity you want in the CrashboxGranularity option

At the FSDeveloper forum there was a question about the size of crashboxes in FSX. These are often not so accurate around your object and that can give trouble with the aircraft crashing too early. So the question was how to change that? I did not know the answer, but I found it. There is an undocumented option in XtoMDL that lets you specify the granularity of the crashboxes. /CRASHGRANULARITY:1.0 That’s the additional parameter you can specify for XtoMDL. The granularity seems to be given in meters. If you don’t specify this option you get a crashbox of 8x8x8 cells. … Continue reading An undocumented XtoMDL parameter

ModelConverterX uses certain default values for the material settings when you press the “Set Default Transparent” button in the material editor. On of them is the alpha test value, which had a fixed value before. But with some alpha values in the texture that could result in the transparent part  not showing up properly. This would mainly happen with parts that are very transparent (alpha value between 0 and 128). Today I have changed how ModelConverterX sets this setting and it now also looks at the texture you are using. So if you have a low alpha value, the setting … Continue reading Alpha test level