SceneryDesign.org The COLLADA reader for ModelConverterX, that I talked about in the previous post, will be available in the development release from tomorrow. The reader can read the geometries and materials used by the objects. At the moment transformations and animations are not yet supported. Below is another screenshot of the duck test object, now with […]
COLLADA reader
Last I week I gave Google Sketchup another try and it seems a program you can learn to use quite quickly. If you compare it with GMax I think it has a learning curve that is much less steep. And I think if you model carefully in Sketchup you can make models with it that […]
LOD Creator improvements
The functionality in ModelConverterX to create lower level of detail versions of a model was running very slow for complex objects. I have not fixed that completely (yet), but I have made some changes to this functionality that should at least make it easier to work with. The calculation that simplifies the object is now […]
3DS exporter improved
I have just fixed some bugs in the 3DS exporter of ModelConverterX. The main issue solved is that complex objects often could not be imported into GMax. Without going into too much technical details, this was caused by some variables being stored as a short, allowing a maximum value of 65535. Some object parts had […]
Object report
I have added another new feature to ModelConverterX that was on my wishlist for a while already, this is the feature to generate a HTML report of the objects loaded. This can be good for reference or to know which files are used and should be included in your distribution. For more details see this […]
Material highlighting (and more)
I have made some changes to ModelConverterX that should make it easier to tweak or analyze models. The changes are that some of the forms are no longer modal and that you can highlight the selected material in the preview. For all details, please see this forum post.
Attachpoints
Today I have been working a bit more on ModelConverterX. More specific on reading attachpoints for FS2004 scenery MDL files (for FSX files it was working already). While doing so I also took at a look at attached library objects, since their code is relatively similar I was able to add support for that type […]
FSDS support
One of the features on the ModelConverterX wishlist is adding support for writing FSDS FSC files. I can now say that I started working on this. I got a SDK from Louis Sinclair, the author of FSDS, that explains how the file format works. To get more used to the format I decided to first […]
FS2004 animations
In the next development release of ModelConverterX you will find support for reading animations from FS2004 scenery MDL files. Or at least a first implementation of this feature. It is working for my test object currently, but I need to look for some more test files to be sure if it is robust enough. So […]
Using my own tool
In the last week I did not do so much development on the ModelConverterX tool. The main reason for that was that I was actually using the tool myself. In the NL2000 project we have a collection of hundreds API macros that are positioned through the entire country of the Netherlands. It would be a […]