SceneryDesign.org A recent question by Don Grovestine on the FSDeveloper forum made me look more at the shadows of FSX models. As everybody knows, turning on the shadows in FSX can have a considerable influence on the performance. But the FSX MDL format also does allow you to specify a custom model that is used to […]
First beta Animation Tweaker available
I have just put the first version of the Animation Tweaker in the ModelConverterX development release. You will find it in the Wizards menu. This first version can do two things (or actually it does those two automatically to all files you process with it): Make FS2004 animations with more than 1024 frames Update the […]
The CAT is not dead
One of the first tool I made for scenery designers was the Conditional Animation Tool, CAT. The first version of this tool was released in 2003 and I mainly started making it because I grew tired of tweaking animations by hand (and I got tired of explaining people how to tweak them by hand). After […]
Longer FS2004 animations
Remember the limitation in the FS2004 GMax for the length of animations? The tool does not allow us to export animations longer than 1024 frames. This is quite annoying, since that limits your animation length to only 55 seconds. Luckily the FSX gamepack does not have that limitation. I have written down how to tweak […]
Places multiple instances
I am working on a ModelConverterX update that will include better support for the placement of objects. One thing that will change is that placement information will be read from BGL files. But I am also changing the functionality in ModelConverterX that allows you to place objects. One of the main changes there is that […]
New batch convert user interface available
The updated batch convert user interface, I blogged about earlier this week, is now available in the development release of ModelConverterX. And what better way to demonstrate it, than with a video tutorial:
Updating the batch functionality
In the last week or so I got two requests to make small modifications to the batch convert functionality of ModelConverterX. But instead of just making these small changes, I have decided to give this functionality a bigger update (that was something I had in mind already). My goal is to make the batch convert […]
ModelConverterX on Linux
Yesterday I updated my Linux machine to the latest version of Ubuntu. One of the components that was updated along the way was Wine. So this morning I decided to try to start ModelConverterX using Wine. I had tried this before, but then it resulted in a crash as far as I remember, because one […]
Importing into GMax
Today I was trying to import an object into GMax again. As usual I used ModelConverterX to make a 3DS file and then imported that one. But, also as usual, that meant a lot of trouble with the textures. Especially since the 3DS format can only store short DOS filenames, it can be quite some […]
Level of detail for FS2004 models
Tonight I have been improving how ModelConverterX reads levels of detail from FS2004 MDL files. The LOD values are now calculated more accurately. Since I spend quite some time figuring out some details I had figured out last year already (but forgot since then), let me sum up my main findings about levels of detail: […]