Improvements for aircraft models

In the next ModelConverterX development release there are two big changes that are mainly important for aircraft modellers:

When a custom animation is used in the FSX MDL file that is not defined in the modeldef.xml file that you pointed ModelConverterX to it will no longer be ignored. Instead ModelConverterX will read the animation parameters from the MDL file and add the right XML code to the modeldef.xml file. It does this all in memory so the modeldef.xml file on your disk is not altered by the tool.

Mouse rectangles and now read from and written to FSX MDL files as well. Just as for the custom animations ModelConverterX will first try to find the mouse rectangle definition in the modeldef.xml file and if it does not find the right one, new XML code is added in memory.

In the Hierarchy viewer you see with mouse rectangle is assigned to which part, just as you can see the visibility conditions.

I tried to test these new features as good as possible, but I am no aircraft designer myself. So I am sure you might come across some animation or mouse rectangle that does not work exactly as expected. In that case please let me know.

One other issue you might come across while examining your VC for mouse rectangles  is that the ModelConverterX preview becomes slow if you load a complex VC model. For the FSX default models it still works fine, but the much more detailed VC models that come with many of payware aircraft will bring the preview down to a slide show. I am investigation where the performance bottleneck is and hope to fix this in an update soon.

Moving around in the preview

p11sTo move around in the ModelConverterX object preview you would use your mouse. With the left button you can rotate the object, with the right button you can pan the object. And with the mouse wheel you can zoom.

And to control how much zoom and pan you give there are two options: PanScale and ZoomScale. These can be changed to determine how much pan and zoom effect moving your mouse gives.

A while ago I also added a sensitive mode. This means that if you keep the S key pressed all rotating, panning and zooming will go with steps that are 10 times smaller than normal.

And from the next development release there is another way to move around in the preview. You can now use the keys on your keyboard as well. With the arrow keys you can move around over the ground plane. With the up key you go forward, with the down key backwards. Left and right obviously move you in those directions. And the page up and page down keys can be used to move up and down respectively.

Hopefully this new navigation mode makes it even easier to move around and inspect your models.

Back online

offlineIt must have been Murphy’s law, just a day after I left home the server on which this website runs went offline. And remote I could not login anymore to correct the problem. So this site has been offline for a couple of days now.

Today I got back home again and after a quick reboot of the server everything seems to be running fine again. Just let me know if you still have any and sorry for the inconvenience.

Recent changes

In the last three weeks I have been a bit busy, so I haven’t posted about the changes I made to my tools recently. Here is a quick overview of the most important changes:

  • There was a memory leak in scenProc when using the SplitGrid step, this has been fixed. But if you still have a version build between the 2nd and 11th of March, I would urge you to update to the latest version.
  • You can now highlight the selected part in the hierarchy viewer in the preview. This can be useful to identify with node of the scenegraph you have selected.
  • There was a bug that objects with empty LOD did not export correctly anymore, that has been fixed now.
  • I have added a new batch operator to apply a material template. This means that you can now apply a certain material template to a selection of objects using the batch convert wizard. Given that applying a night texture is also a material template, the special batch operator to apply a night texture has been removed now.

Visibility tags

I have added a new feature to ModelConverterX, it now also uses the visibility tags that are used often in FSX aircraft models. They are read from either the MDL or the X file. And when exporting to FSX MDL they are written as well. So this should mean that such visibility tags no longer get lost when converting a FSX MDL with ModelConverterX.

At the moment there is no way to edit the visibility tags yet, but in the hierarchy viewer you can see which tag is added to a node. I guess for the future I should add some functionality in the preview that allows users to switch the visibility tags on or off.

Batch convert changes

In the next development release a couple of changes have been made in the batch convert wizard of ModelConverterX. The main changes are:

  • You can now select if you want to save objects or scenery. When you select objects each model in the selected files is saved as a separate file. If you select scenery, one output file will be made for each input file.
  • There are two button to save and load the batch convert settings. This will save the files you have selected to process, the operators and their settings and the output settings. So this should make it easier to run the same or similar batch runs in the future.

I have added some new batch operators as well, this is an overview of them:

  • Add placement: adds a placement (latitude/longitude) to all objects
  • Center object: makes sure the reference point is in the centre of the object. If the object has a placement, this placement is also updated to match the shift of the object.
  • Rename object: renames all objects to the given name, if multiple objects in one file they are extended with a number
  • Rename textures: rename all textures of an object. They are renamed with the object name, followed by a number

I plan to write another blog post soon explaining how I used these new operators, so that it makes more sense why I added them.

Importing 3DS files

I have just added a new importer to ModelConverterX. From the next development release you will also be able to import files in the 3DS format. Below is a quick overview of what is supported and what the limitations are:

  • Geometry and texture mapping is read
  • The 3DS format does not store the normals of the object, so after import they might be slightly different. Although the library I use to import has a feature to reconstruct the normals for smooth objects. That seems to work quite well.
  • Animations are supported. But the special FSX tagging for animations is stored as a user property and those are not written to the 3DS file. So that information can not be imported either.
  • I have tried to map the different material settings that the 3DS format supports to the FSX material as well as possible. But the 3DS file can not store the FSX specific settings.
  • Another limitation of the 3DS format is that texture names are stored in the old DOS way. So that means only 8.3 characters are available. Any longer texture name will be truncated. So when importing from 3DS you might want to double check your texture names.

By implementing this new reader and especially the animation part, I have learned a lot about how animations are stored in the 3DS format. So my next update will be for the 3DS export functionality of ModelConverterX. I want to add support to export animations to that as well.

7 days, 7 tools

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Most of you know that I make all those flight simulation development tools for fun, it is my hobby. This means I have no tight schedule for when I work on certain features, I just work on the tool or the feature that I most enjoy at the moment.

So that means that sometimes I jump around between development of different tools quite a bit. Usually this is a lot of fun, but sometimes the distraction means that a certain feature does not get finished as quickly as I would like.

Most of the time I don’t even notice that I work like this. But about a week of two ago I noticed that I had worked on about 7 different tools or projects in one week. Just for the fun of it, let me share with you how my distraction can work during a week… (and luckily for myself it is not always like this, that would probably drive me crazy :))

  1. Sunday, triggered by some discussion on the forum about the ModelConverterX object report I decide to start working on a new feature that should make it easier to save screenshots in any resolution and without rendering the object on screen first. This feature is on my wishlist for a while already and it gives me the chance to try some new OpenGL functions as well.
  2. Monday, while browsing through some geo data on the internet I find interesting vector data that contains population density data of the Netherlands. This is exactly the kind of data I have been looking for, since it will allow me to let scenProc set the distribution of the building heights based on this data. So I quickly jump to scenProc to implement this new feature.
  3. Tuesday, still working on the new scenProc feature. I actually got it implemented and working. Great!
  4. Wednesday, while browsing the same website as Monday I also find some new elevation data for the Netherlands. For the NL2000 project we have been looking for better elevation data for quite a while already. Using GDAL and resample and I put the data into FSX quite quickly. Only problem is that the data has not been filtered for the cities, so that buildings are visible in the elevation data.
  5. Thursday, I remember that I have some vector data laying around that has contour lines for the Netherlands. Using GDAL (once again) I create raster elevation data from these contour lines. I then use this data to replace the data I found on Wednesday in the city areas. Luckily some vector data was supplied with the elevation data that tells which data has not been filtered. It is really amazing what you can do with gdal_rasterize and gdal_calc! So I have much better elevation data now.
    Within the NL2000 project we get questions quite often if we can make a version for X-Plane as well. Triggered by one of those discussions again I decide to check how the tool that converts FS scenery to X-Plane works. ModelConverterX can already read X-Plane OBJ files and adding support to write them is on my wishlist for a while already. But to make a useful conversion I should figure out how the placement of objects works in X-Plane. This is also something I was planing to do for a while already. So let’s print the X-Plane DSF file format description and read it before going to sleep.
  6. Friday, the DSF file format is well documented and should not be that difficult to read. I am looking forward to experiment with reading and writing that format a bit. But to be able if I read the format correctly it would be best to be able to display the objects defined in it on a map. That’s exactly what the ObPlacerX² tool I made a prototype of last year does. So let’s dust off that prototype again!
  7. Saturday, to get the ObPlacerX² tool working with the most recent version of my other tools, I would need to make some changes to the way that object placements are represented internally. This is also something that I have been thinking about before, as it would also make ModelConverterX more efficient and better structured. So let’s start and make those changes first.

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Recent changes

Over the last weekend I made a couple of changes to the development releases of my tools. Here is a quick overview of the changes:

  • Last Friday I introduce the big changes to ModelConverterX that allow multiple object placements. Unfortunately some bugs slipped into these changes. These caused crashes while loading certain BGL files and also the drawcall minimizer was not working correctly anymore. All of these bugs should be fixed by tomorrows development release. But let me know if you find some new issues.
  • Last week I added an extra filter to the scenProc step that sets the height of the buildings in a tile. Now a similar filter has been added to the steps that set the building texture, row house texture and vegetation settings. This means you can now set them differently for each tile.
  • There was a bug in scenProc as well for the way it wrote library objects to autogen files. Due to this bug these library objects did not show correctly in Annotator and that also meant that when saving in Annotator they would be lost. This bug has been fixed now. So if you made autogen files with library objects in a prior scenProc version it is highly recommended that you recreate them with the latest build.
  • Last change is that the ground polygon wizard of ModelConverterX now has two additional checkboxes that allow you to select and deselect all textures at once to enable night textures and/or seasonal textures. Especially for models with many textures this should save quite some mouse clicks.