Viewer functionality

As mentioned in my earlier post I would show a bit more of the progress on the reading and display of animations. I have now added control for the animation to the ModelConverterX form. In the animation below you can see the animation from the default baggage loader object. [View:http://msmvps.com/cfs-file.ashx/__key/CommunityServer.Components.PostAttachments/00.01.64.56.52/BagLoader.swf:450:365] As you can see there […]

Animation progress

Yesterday I made some progress again in reading and understanding the animation code. I can now succesfully read the scenegraph information as well. This information determines how the different transformations and animations relate to each other (child and peer relations). This makes sure they are added together in the correct way, to get the desired […]

First animation test

I am quite happy that I (sort of) got animations to work in ModelConverterX now. It is just a very simple test animation I made and there are some bugs in it left. But this is quite a big step. I never got this far in MDL Tweaker before. See a small video capture below. […]

FSDS design blog

For those of you using FSDS as a modelling tool for Flight Simulator, it might be interesting to know that Adam Howe of Abacus has started a blog now. It already contains some tutorials that seem useful for FSDS users and hopefully the future will bring more interesting posts.

From the old shoebox (1)

Today I was cleaning out some old stuff in my computer room, when I came across some old sketches I made when designing scenery objects for FS98. Since then things have changed a bit, so I thought it would be funny to show them to you. I should start by mentioning that at that time […]

The animation puzzle

This evening I continued with the FSX MDL reader for ModelConverterX. With the LODs done, my next challenge was to read the transformations correctly as well, as some objects now show displaced parts. This was easier said than done, as understanding the way transformations are assigned, also means understanding how the animations work. Luckily, after […]

Objects with a LOD

I have added another improvement to ModelConverterX, it can now read the levels of detail from a MDL file and also display them. This is nice to see how Microsoft has made their LODs. At the moment this functionality only works for the FSX MDL reader, as there is not a very structured way in […]

Shadow model

While working on the FSX MDL reader for ModelConverterX I came across something interesting. I had some models that showed up a bit weird to say the least. It turned out that I was reading both their exterior model and their shadow model. But wait, did you say shadow model there? In the MDL format […]

Sneak preview

Since I released alpha version 13 of ModelConverterX, I have been working on the next version. For that release I have mainly planned improvements to the usability of the tool. So that means the user interface gets cleaned up a bit, functions are made more logical etc. Another example of the things I am implementing […]