Since my previous blog post about the new Instant Object Studio tool I received a review copy of the tool (thanks for that Konstantin). So I am now able to answer some of the questions I still raised in my previous post.

When placing for example a roof on a box, the tool does not remove the top polygon of the box, altough it is not visible. So that means there are slightly more polygons than optimal, but for most objects that should not matter too much for the performance. Especially if you make sure it has the same material as other polygons in the model, in that case it ends up in the same drawcall.

Speaking about drawcalls, as long as you are careful about how many materials you use when modelling, the generated scenery objects can be very light on drawcalls. As an example I tried to model the house I did for my SketchUp tutorial again with this tool. This house only uses one texture sheet, so the generated model has only one drawcall.

I also mentioned in my previous post that I did not like the visually dragging and scaling of the textures, as that makes it hard to align exactly the part of the texture sheet you want. Especially when you put all your texture parts in one big sheet that can be tricky. But there is a function in Instant Object Studio to help you with that already.

In the material settings you can select that the texture should be stretched along the X and Y axes. With the Area button you can then choose the area of the texture you want. If you then apply it to a polygon, exactly that piece of the texture will be fitted on the entire polygon. Works quite neat I would say. It’s not as flexible as the UVW Unwrap editor in GMax, but I feel it gives me better control over where the texture goes than in SketchUp. Maybe starting scenery developers won’t appreciate this feature so much, but if you try to model with one texture sheet only I feel it comes in handy.

I’ll continue to test this tool more, as it seems to be packed with interesting features. Make sure to read the manual to learn about all the shortcuts and restrictions that can be applied. Next thing I will probably test is see how easy it is to make a building when you have a photo scenery showing that building. The object I made now is in the middle of the sea. But I think this tool can be really handy to trace buildings from photo scenery. I’ll share my experiences again after I have tested this.

Flight1 has released a new tool, Instant Object Studio. This evening I had a play with the demo version and I must say I am surprised by the tool. After seeing the video I had the impression that the tool would be nice to make some quick buildings, but that it would be hard to make really detailed photo realistic objects with it. But after testing the demo version a bit I think I was wrong there. Since the demo version does not do export, I have not yet been able to see how optimized the output generated by the tool is.

Here’s a list of the positive things I have noted:

• The concept of building your object inside FS is cool!
• Making the geometry is quite easy. The different shapes snap together and after reading the maniual (yes :)) I found out there are some easy ways to fix the movement of polygons or edges along an axis. All that together makes it rather fun to model the shape you want. It’s a bit like SketchUp. Modelling geometry in SketchUp is also fun (more fun than in GMax at least).
• When making a new material you have access to all the FSX specific settings if you want, but they are hidden under advanced settings.
• It is cool how you can easily make your own texture using the generic templates. You can adjust colours and even overlay a second texture. Nicely done, only don’t get carried away as you might end up with a lot of drawcalls.
• You have rather good control over the texture mapping. I think it is even easier than those clumsy pins in SketchUp. So even if you have all parts of your house on one texture (as you would try for good performance), it is not too hard to alter the texture mapping.
• You can attach effects and control the amount of detail in the crashboxes.
• The fact that your textures are directly saved in the format that FS needs and that your model is exported to BGL right away will be very useful for many people. It saves the steps to use BGLComp, ImageTool, etc. Especially for new developers that is very good.

Of course there are also some points I am not so sure about:

• Although the manual mentions it is important to use as few textures as possible, the way you can make generic textures could tempt a lot of people to use much more textures than is good for the performance. If you only build one of two houses it is not going to hurt, but on bigger projects it will.
• Although it is cool to work in FS directly, it also adds overhead. FS running uses more memory and CPU than the average modelling tool. And when making scenery you will often have a painting program and some other utilities open as well. I did not yet run into trouble, but I guess it could happen.
• I would like to have more control over the texture mapping, a bit like a UVW unwrap editor where you can move each vertex of the polygon to the correct texture position. But that could be me, I am a control freak and prefer to have my mapping very accurate.

Since I haven’t been able to save yet, I can’t judge yet how easy it would be to adjust your model after you made it. For example if you made a mistake in the shape of the texture mapping. I’ll probably buy the tool so that I can have a look at that. And then I can check how optimized hte output is as well.

So all in total I think this is a very nice tool for people who want to build a few scenery objects or maybe their small local airport. Working with it is quite fun (which is also important). And from the functionality point of view I think it is similar to modelling with SketchUp. You won’t get the fancy animations, levels of detail and very complex shapes that you can achieve with GMax or 3DS Max. But on the other hand it is much easier to learn and probably more enjoyable to use.