Exporting custom shadow models

For many years ModelConverterX has the function already to render a custom shadow model that has been imported from a FSX/P3D MDL file. But the feature to also export these custom shadow models to MDL files was on the wish-list for quite a while already. When working on the FS2004 unlimited export feature recently, I realised that exporting the a custom shadow model to FS2004 was very easy. So with that in mind I started to implement this feature now.

So from the latest development release you can now export a custom shadow model to FS2004, FSX and P3D MDL files. The screenshots below show a test model I exported to FSX (left) and FS2004 (right). I loaded a COLLADA test object with the COLLADA logo as the shadow model for this church.

And since I needed to test if exporting the custom shadow model to FS2004 models worked, I also had to implement reading custom shadow model from FS2004 scenery and aircraft MDL files. So ModelConverterX can now also render the custom shadow models from these MDL files.

FS2004 Unlimited Export (part 2)

The latest development release of ModelConverterX does also include the ASM tweaks that allow aircraft models with more than 65k vertices to export. All you have to do is enable the Unlimited Export Tweak option in the save file dialog. When a model has more than 65k vertices ModelConverterX will automatically modify the model so that it is exported with different levels of detail and apply the ASM tweaks to show these levels of detail at the same time. This apply to both the internal and external model.

“Helpful”AI

I am working on implementing the FS2004 Unlimited Export tweaks into ModelConverterX. After I had the tweaks working for the external model, I was looking for some information on how to use different LOD in the internal model, since until now ModelConverterX only allowed exporting one LOD for the internal model.

So I used an AI chat bot to get some more information on how developers for FS2004 typically export their internal models, especially when they are using the Unlimited Export tweaks. Was the result of the AI chat bot helpful? Not really, it told me that I could use ModelConverterX to export a FS2004 internal model with the Unlimited Export tweaks. It even showed me a plan with various steps and settings to check and a CFG file where I could configure the different LODs for the internal model. It all looked quite convincing. But…..

  1. Since I am still implementing this feature, all of the ModelConverterX functionality that it talked about is non-existent and all options where made up as well. I only mentioned the Unlimited Export function in a blog post a week ago when I implemented the 4 mm weld limit workaround. So it is interesting how quickly the chat bot try to combine that information into this answer.
  2. The CGF files it showed for the LOD looked a bit like the model.cfg files that we can use in FS, but for FS2004 the internal and external model are in the same MDL file. So specifying your LOD in such a file was also made up (probably inspired by another game or engine that offers this).

Another nice example of an AI chat bot hallucinating and not really helping me to solve my question. In the end I found a few threads on FSDeveloper that contained much more useful information what the functionality I wanted to implement. So it turns out that fellow FS developers are a more trustworthy source of information.

By the way, I am making good progress with implementing the Unlimited Export function, so I hope to be able to push it into the development release soon.

FS2004 Unlimited Export (part 1)

For quite some time it has been on my wishlist to study the FS2004 Unlimited Export tutorial that Bill Lionheart made many years ago. It is a very well done and extensive tutorial of over 50 slides. So maybe that scared me off a bit. But recently I read through the tutorial and with my tool developer perspective I realized that it would not be that hard to implement that logic in ModelConverterX. The tutorial has to do al kind of additional steps to work around limitations in the FS2004 GMax gamepack, for example to get your X files. But within ModelConverterX I have full control and access to these items. What also helped is that recently I implemented other ASM tweaks in the FS2004 MDL writer, so that made it easier to do the unlimited export tweak as well.

The current development release of ModelConverterX has the first part of the unlimited export function implemented. That is the bit that works around the 4 mm weld limitation of MakeMDL by scaling up the model on export and then tweaking the ASM file to get the proper size.

If you enable the Unlimited Export Tweak option on the FS2004 aircraft MDL export dialog this 4 mm weld limitation tweak is applied to your FS2004 aircraft model. This means that you can use small details in your cockpit again without losing them on export.

I plan to implement part 2 of the tweak soon as well, those are the tweaks to work around the 65k triangle limit of MakeMDL. Once that is done I will make another blog post about it.

Select nodes by dragging an area

For a while ModelConverterX has a feature that you can use the select mode to select a node interactively in the preview. I have now modified this functionality so that you can also select multiple nodes at once by dragging an area with the mouse, before only a single click on an object was supported. The video below gives a short demonstration of this modified functionality.

As you might see in the video, I did also change how the interaction mode is selected. Before it was a dropdown menu, but I have modified it to button now as that makes it easier to select a new mode. The keyboard shortcuts to select a new interaction mode are still the same.

Since the mouse can now to used to drag the selection area, you can no longer rotate or pan the preview while you are in selection mode. Zooming with the mouse wheel is still supported.

Model attachments

I have added a new feature to ModelConverterX. Reading and writing of MSFS model attachments is now also supported. This way you can attach one model XML into another model. ModelConverterX reads the model attachment as a new type of AttachedOobject, an AttachedModel. They can be rendered in the preview like other attach points, but there also is an option (below the show particle effects button) that will render the complete attached model in the preview.

Self-contained builds released

The self-contained builds of ModelConverterX and scenProc that I talked about in the last blog post have been released today. This means that if you download the latest development release of these two tools the download contains everything you need to run it, it is no longer needed to install the right .NET version on your computer (the relevant parts are included in the release).

I am convinced this will make it easier for people to use the tools, as recently there were quite some issues due to missing or wrong .NET versions. But if you have any issues with these new builds, please post so in the forum.

Self contained releases

Since the release of the latest ModelConverterX stable release, which switched from .NET Framework 4.7 to .NET 8.0, I noticed an increase in users who had trouble starting the tool because they did not have the right .NET version installed. The tool does not give an error, but just closes in that case.

i am currently testing a new way to deploy the tools, as self contained applications, which means that all relevant .NET files are included and the users does not manually have to install .NET anymore. Testing is almost done and I hope to release the development release with this new method in a week or so.

The only downside is that the size of the download of the tool does increase, but I think that is worth the extra ease it gives to users.

ModelConverterX Object format

While debugging an issue in ModelConverterX I had the need to compare the internal representation of the objects in detail. So I decided to write some code so that I can export this representation to a file and then compare those two files.

But since I thought it might be useful for users as well to store the internal representation of the object to file, I have added this functionality now to the development release. You will see a new file format, ModelConverterX Object (MOB), in the import and export dialogues. This format will export the entire internal representation of your object. So if you want to save your work, without exporting to a flight simulator format, you can use this format as well now.

There even is an option to also embed the textures of the object in the same file. This can be useful if you for example used the Drawcall Minimizer to create new textures, but you have not yet saved them to disk afterwards. In the MOB format these new textures can be stored internally.

Two notes of warning:

  1. I do not plan to ensure backward compatibility of the MOB format over different versions. So this file format is really intended to store an object and then import it with the same version of ModelConverterX. You might not be able to import a MOB file that you saved a year later though.
  2. I think I have implemented all attributes of the internal representation to the MOB format, but if you found something that is lost on export or import, please let me know.

Exporting skin and bone animations to glTF and FBX

Adding support to read skin and bone animations from the glTF format took quite a while to implement. The functionality to also export the skin and bone animations was luckily a lot easier to implement. With all the changes and improvements I made for reading them, writing took me less than a day to implement. This means that with the current development release you can now also export skin and bone animations to the glTF and FBX formats.

There is one limitation to this. Just as when exporting normal animations to the glTF format, there is a restriction that you can only export them if you read the object from an open format. If you read the object from a compiled format (MDL or BGL), then exporting the skin and bone animations is only supported for simple objects with less than 5 animations of the ambient type.

Does this mean I am fully done with skin and bone animations now? No, not yet, there are still a few related issues on the todo list:

  • Exporting a skin and bone animations imported from glTF to FSX/P3D does not always give the right results. That is because FSX/P3D handles the bone pose matrices differently.
  • Importing skin and bone animations from glTF objects that have been processed by the MSFS package tool still has issues, certain parts are displaced.

I plan to have a look at these two remaining issues soon, so that afterwards I can call the skin and bone animation topic closed.