In the last days there has been a lot of discussion on the FSDeveloper forum about converting COLLADA objects for use in FSX. One of the issues the users are facing is that many COLLADA models use textures in formats that FSX can not read, for example JPG files. So there is clearly a need to address this during the conversion.

I have not finished it, but I am working on adding support for texture conversions to ModelConverterX. In the next development release you will find a texture converter tool in the special tools menu. Although I made it more as a test tool to see if saving textures is working, I think it can also have practical use when converting your models. For example when you model still uses R8 textures that you want to convert to BMP or DDS. I should say directly that saving to DDS or extended BMP formats is not yet working, but I hope to have that feature very soon as well. So below you see a screenshot of the converter with a texture loaded.

Using the radio buttons you can select which channel you want to see. Another interesting feature, especially if your model using the BitmapMode command to determine which colour should be transparent, is that you can set the alpha channel based on a colour. So in this case if I would select black as the transparent colour you would get the alpha channel as shown below.

As I said, I hope to add support for DDS and extended BMP textures soon, since these are the primary formats used by FS. After that I am also planning to add another tool to ModelConverterX that allows you to easily rename, convert or resize multiple textures at once. Because this texture converter tool I added now is not really of assistance when you have a COLLADA model with a few dozen of textures. I’ll keep you informed about the progress on these other features I have in mind.