SceneryDesign.org And here is a screenshot of the church made with SketchUp in FSX. It has been converted with ModelConverterX and is showing on the NL2000 v4 scenery. I am not completely satisfied with the textures yet, they seem a bit too light when viewed in FSX, so I think I will change them a bit. […]
SketchUp texturing and FSX conversion
Let’s start with the good news, I finished my model of the church in Abcoude. All the textures have been applied as you can see in the screenshot below. But I learned some interesting things while trying to get that far. Let me start with explaining my approach to texturing the building. I had decided […]
Today’s SketchUp adventures
After all the work I did on the COLLADA and KMZ importers for ModelConverterX, I thought it would be a good moment to try to model a bit more in SketchUp myself. So about a week ago I cycled to the nearby town of Abcoude and made a bunch of pictures of their local church. […]
FSX temporarily sold out
To be honest I don’t know how long this announcement is on the FSInsider website already, but it seems that MS has run out of copies of FSX. The good news is that they are making new copies, so FSX should be available again at the end of May. Since it is very important for […]
CFG tweaks and performance
Recently tweaking the FSX.cfg file to get better performance and solve some display problems has been a hot topic in the FS community. And now it seems Lefteris has made a nice little tool to assist in this tweaking. So check out his blog post for more details about the tweaking and the tool.
Drawcall minimizer video
I have made a little demonstration video that shows how you can use the drawcall minimzer. In this video I will be converting a KMZ file to a MDL file. In that process I am using the mass texture editor and the drawcall minimizer to make sure the textures end up as efficient as possible. […]
Minimize drawcall functionality
One of the challenges when converting old API macros or COLLADA objects is often how to make them framerate friendly. It is not uncommon for such objects to use many small texture files. If you for example load an object from the Google 3D warehouse, don’t be surprised to find it uses 40 different texture […]
openVFR
If you are looking to add more details to your FSX, have a look at the interesting project openVFR. It uses OpenStreetMap data and it really makes the scenery look a lot more realistic. With a bit of luck you can find your own street. I think this kind of scenery is a great alternative […]
Modelling for FSX using Sketchup
One of the topics that is discussed often lately on the FSDeveloper forums is using Sketchup to model for FSX. The good news for those of you who think that the learning curve of GMax is a bit too steep, is that you can use Sketchup as well if you want to model some scenery […]
Texture conversions
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 […]