SceneryDesign.org Today I was experimenting a bit with using normal maps and bump maps in gPoly. So this meant I had to make some bump maps and while doing so it bothered me again that you have to transform the output of the normalmap plugins to work correctly in FSX. Maybe it is my GIMP skills, […]
NL2000 v4.0 release
Over the last three years the NL2000 team has been working hard on making their scenery compatible with FSX and many improvements have been made to the scenery during these years as well. Tonight was finally the moment of the release, the new version is now available for downloading. Given the huge size of 32 […]
ModelConverterX 1.2 released
A new stable version of ModelConverterX has been released. Especially for users converting COLLADA and SketchUp objects this should mean that they can use the stable version again. Since version 1.1 I changed so much, that we always had to tell those users that they needed the development release. Have a look at this post […]
Abcoude church in FSX
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. […]
Drawcall minimzer with night textures
A few weeks ago I introduced the Drawcall minimizer functionality of ModelConverterX. This function can pack the different textures used on your model into bigger texture sheets to reduce the amount of drawcalls. This will result in a better performance in FSX. One of the main drawbacks of the initial implementation was that only the […]
Read The Fine Manual
I guess everybody knows the abbreviation RTFM and of course we all read the fine manual when we are using a tool. But for ModelConverterX I usually only update the manual with every stable release and the recent survey showed that most of you are actually using the development release. So as a result of […]
Tool in a mid-life crisis?
Some time ago I started a survey to understand better how ModelConverterX is used. Thanks to everybody who provided their feedback, I have now collected the answers and made an overview of them. Luckily many of the answers are not too surprising, it seems in general the tool is being used as I had expected. […]
Exporting animations to FS2004
In the next development release of ModelConverterX you will find a first implementation of exporting animations to FS2004 scenery MDL files. This item was on the wishlist for quite some time already and I have now given implementing it a try. I am sure you will find some bugs in this first implementation. Some of […]