Author: arnogerretsen

The development release of ModelConverterX now contains an updated preview of the objects. It is now using OpenGL shaders, which as enabled me to add some cool new functions. Like showing bump maps and the reflection influenced by specular maps. Be aware that this is a big change, so it might have resulted a few new bugs here and there. Please let me know if you have any issues. And in case of big issues, you can always revert to the stable 1.3 release until I have fixed them.

Since my previous blog post about the new Instant Object Studio tool I received a review copy of the tool (thanks for that Konstantin). So I am now able to answer some of the questions I still raised in my previous post. When placing for example a roof on a box, the tool does not remove the top polygon of the box, altough it is not visible. So that means there are slightly more polygons than optimal, but for most objects that should not matter too much for the performance. Especially if you make sure it has the same material … Continue reading Instant Object Studio – part 2

Flight1 has released a new tool, Instant Object Studio. This evening I had a play with the demo version and I must say I am surprised by the tool. After seeing the video I had the impression that the tool would be nice to make some quick buildings, but that it would be hard to make really detailed photo realistic objects with it. But after testing the demo version a bit I think I was wrong there. Since the demo version does not do export, I have not yet been able to see how optimized the output generated by the … Continue reading Instant Object Studio

Just a quick note that ModelConverterX 1.3 (stable version) has been released. It is the same as the development version of yesterday, but now with a updated manual. It will be the stable release for the near future, since version 1.2 was getting very old. You can read some more information here.

I have updated the ground polygon wizard in ModelConverterX. Two new features have been added to it in the latest development release: You can now specify which layer and visibility are used by default in the options. This should mean that you have to change less values while working on your ground polygons. An option has been added to convert the textures used on the ground polygons. This means they are converted to DDS (when using FSX) or DXT BMP (when using FS2004). Before you would have to do this conversion manual. In the screenshot on the right you see … Continue reading Ground polygon wizard upate

I have added a new function to ModelConverterX. It can now also read X files. This can be a X file generated by the FS2004 or FSX gamepack, but also a X file generated by another tool that does not contain the FS specific information. The following features will be read from the X file: Geometry, normals and texture coordinates Material settings (including FSX specific material settings) LOD information Animations This new functionality is in the latest development release. Let me know if you have any issues with this feature.

Just to let you know this blog is still alive. Just recently I did not have too much time to post interesting things here. But that does not mean I haven’t been (silently) working on new things. Here are some of the things I have been working on recently and once they are finished you will read more about them on this blog as well: Improving the reading of aircraft MDL files in ModelConverterX, especially when it comes to the animations of the aircraft. Improving the ModelConverterX preview. I have been experimenting with using shaders and that seems to be … Continue reading Yes this blog is still alive

I have update the Animation Editor in ModelConverterX. Before this form could only be used to remove all animations from your object, but now it can do more. The following features have been added:   Select which animations are active and shown in the preview. Examine only sections of an animation, for example by looping only a subset of all frames. Remove the selected animations. These will then be “frozen” to the animation frame you have selected. This is similar to the function to remove all animations before, but now it can be done per animation.   I have made … Continue reading Animation Editor updated

I have just added a new feature to the ModelConverterX development release. It is a MDL Tweaker that you can find in the special tools menu. Let me first explain how this tweaker differs from loading a MDL into ModelConverterX itself. When you import a MDL into ModelConverterX the object is read and stored in an internal representation. ModelConverterX then works with this internal representation when you make changes. In the end this internal representation is exported again to a MDL file. The MDL Tweaker works differently, it directly manipulates the binary code of the MDL file, without decoding it … Continue reading MDL Tweaker

A recent question by Don Grovestine on the FSDeveloper forum made me look more at the shadows of FSX models. As everybody knows, turning on the shadows in FSX can have a considerable influence on the performance. But the FSX MDL format also does allow you to specify a custom model that is used to render the shadow. I did some testing today to determine how big the performance difference can be. I started by making a rather complex object, with almost 6000 triangles. And I placed many instances of it at my favourite test location. The screenshot below shows how the … Continue reading Custom shadow model