I have made a new video tutorial. In this tutorial I demonstrate how you can use the new material editor to optimize a model. The optimize tab and the drawcall minimizer are demonstrated.
Material editor and saving textures
Until now the material editor would save a new texture directly for every change you made. So for example renaming the texture or changing the size. When doing multiple operations in a row that resulted in many textures in the texture folder that were not used in the end. And for the user there was […]
Drawcall minimizer and repeating textures
Tomorrows development release will contain a couple of improvements to the drawcall minimizer functionality. The main improvement is that you can now also minimize textures that are repeating. ModelConverterX will repeat those textures for you, before inserting them into the combined texture sheet. As you can see in the image below, there is a checkbox […]
Match texture function fixed
I have just fixed the match texture function in the material editor. Since the new material editor was introduced this function was broken, but it is working again. With this function you can look for the same texture, with a different name in the specified texture folder. I hope to finalize the new material editor in the next couple […]
Merge objects
I have added a new function to ModelConverterX, you can now merge objects. After you bring up the form there are a couple of things you can do: You can specify the LOD that should be used for the model you are importing. So this allows you to import another model as a lower level […]
Specular and fresnel effects in preview
The next development release of ModelConverterX contains improvements to the rendering of the object in the preview. The two biggest changes are that the specular hotspot and the fresnel effects are now shown in the preview as well. I am not convinced that the fresnel effect is exactly like in FSX, but I think it […]
User interface change
I have changed the main user interface of ModelConverterX a bit, actually it has gone back to some of the concepts that the tool used in 2008 already. I did remove the tabs that were used for the preview, event log and options. Instead of those tabs the options are now on a separate form, […]
Problem reporting
user: He, your tool does not work. me: What do you mean? What are you trying to do and what goes wrong? user: When I import my object it crashes. You need to help me, I have to convert this object. me: What is the error message you get at the crash? Can you maybe […]
Correcting for the FSX curved earth
One of the main differences between FS2004 and FSX when it comes to rendering the earth, is that FS2004 assumes that the earth is locally flat while rendering the scene, while FSX uses the correct curvature of the earth as well. But this has some consequences for scenery designers. When you make ground polygons they […]
Bye, bye, performance indicator mode
ModelConverterX used to have a render mode called performance indicator mode. With this mode you could spot where the texture mapping or normals were not so optimal. The recent updates to the preview have removed that mode. But I have now added two replacements. One is called the Normal Inspect mode and the other TexMap Inspect […]