Animation progress

Yesterday I made some progress again in reading and understanding the animation code. I can now succesfully read the scenegraph information as well. This information determines how the different transformations and animations relate to each other (child and peer relations). This makes sure they are added together in the correct way, to get the desired […]

First animation test

I am quite happy that I (sort of) got animations to work in ModelConverterX now. It is just a very simple test animation I made and there are some bugs in it left. But this is quite a big step. I never got this far in MDL Tweaker before. See a small video capture below. […]

The animation puzzle

This evening I continued with the FSX MDL reader for ModelConverterX. With the LODs done, my next challenge was to read the transformations correctly as well, as some objects now show displaced parts. This was easier said than done, as understanding the way transformations are assigned, also means understanding how the animations work. Luckily, after […]

Objects with a LOD

I have added another improvement to ModelConverterX, it can now read the levels of detail from a MDL file and also display them. This is nice to see how Microsoft has made their LODs. At the moment this functionality only works for the FSX MDL reader, as there is not a very structured way in […]

Shadow model

While working on the FSX MDL reader for ModelConverterX I came across something interesting. I had some models that showed up a bit weird to say the least. It turned out that I was reading both their exterior model and their shadow model. But wait, did you say shadow model there? In the MDL format […]

Sneak preview

Since I released alpha version 13 of ModelConverterX, I have been working on the next version. For that release I have mainly planned improvements to the usability of the tool. So that means the user interface gets cleaned up a bit, functions are made more logical etc. Another example of the things I am implementing […]

Attached objects done

This evening I have been able to take one more step on the problem of attached objects. After cleaning up the ModelConverterX code a bit more they are now really working. It is quite cool to be able to attach effect files now to your object and convert those already in the old SCASM macros. […]

Attached effects

Although Adrian Woods has an interesting post about how to add attachpoints to your X file, it still took me most of the evening to get things working. First I probably picked a wrong effect that does not work for scenery, but I also forgot to add the mesh to the X file frame of […]