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. With those as my reference and some maps I found on the internet, I started modelling the church today. In this blog posts and those that follow until I have finished the object, I will try to give an overview of my adventures while learning more about SketchUp.

Being a bit of a number-head, one of the things that worried me about SketchUp was if I could easily enter numbers for sizes of objects and offsets. I know many people do not worry so much about this, they are mainly concerned with how the object looks, but my style of modelling involves using paper and pencil to calculate distances and things like that. And although it works different from GMax, I must say that I am very happy with the way SketchUp allows you to enter distance when drawing lines or when moving objects.

Below you see a picture of the church and drawing the roof was quite a nice learning experience. With all the SketchUp functionality to draw lines parallel or perpendicular to other lines or the axis, it was in the end quite easy to make this roof. Even though the walls supporting it have different heights.

While modelling the church I also experimented with the match photo function of SketchUp. This function allows you to align your view so that it matches with the position from which you shot your photo. Afterwards you can then model in that view and make the object match the dimensions as show on the photo. At first I had some troubling setting this up correctly, but I think that was many due to make lack of good overview photos. Due to all the trees planted around the church, I mainly made detail photos, while not having many good overviews. My impression is that the match photo function works best with pictures that show a big part of the object.

But in the end I got it setup for some shots I made and it turned out to be a really easy way to determine the height of the roof and the tower. Below you see an picture of the object being aligned with the photo (I made the object transparent so you can see the picture better).

So as you can see in the pictures, the basic shape is done now. I will probably have to add some minor details to gables and that kind of stuff. But I am quite satisfied with the result until now. The next step will be texturing the object. I have already done a little experimenting with projecting pictures on the object (after I used the match photo function), but as you can see in the picture below the results are not good enough yet. I am planning to see how far I can go with projecting the pictures and then using the Drawcall Minimizer of ModelConverterX to make a nice texture sheet. If that does not work, I will go back to the traditional way of making the texture sheet myself.

Another thing I hope to learn from these experiments is how to model most efficiently in SketchUp (from the point of view of FSX). So how do you keep the polygon count and the drawcalls within limits. Using ModelConverterX I can get nice statistics about all those performance related numbers. So more on that and the texturing in a next blog post.

gPoly status update #7

It feels like it is a long time ago I wrote a status update about the gPoly tool. And now that I think about it, it is actually a long time ago. But this weekend I have done some work on the tool again. I have mainly focussed on two functionalities:

  • Being able to save your gPoly project file to disk and afterwards loading it back again. This might be some functionality that sounds very basic, but until now I had not coded it. For my tests I just every time drew some polygons manually. I can now save this effort, since I can load back the projects I made before.
  • Being able to export the project to FS in the form of a BGL file. I have got a basic export working now. But the output is not optimized for performance yet and also the slicing up of the polygons as required by FSX for the curvation of the earth is not yet done. At least I have a basis no to work from, when I start adding those features.

I plan to first improve the exporter further, so it writes the kind of code that works in FSX, before I return to the GUI part of gPoly and start polishing the features there. Now most of them have some rough edges left. But that is for another status update.

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 diffuse textures of the model were packed. I have now finished the code that also packs subtextures, like night textures or bump textures. So that should make it easier to reduce the amount of drawcalls on models that have such textures.

This updated functionality is not yet available in the development release though. It seems to be working on the models I tested until now, but since I made quite some changes to the code to work more efficiently with these subtextures I want to do some more thorough testing to be sure I do not introduce new bugs. So I hope that tomorrow I have finished those tests and this new function will be available.

With this functionality finished, I have implemented all of the features that I planned for the ModelConverterX 1.2 release. There are some minor bugs that I want to fix, but I plan to release another stable version soon. I’ll keep you updated about that as well.

Emails working again

The problems we had at FSDeveloper, which resulted in no emails being sent out by the forum software have been solved. So from now on the forum notifications and the confirmations for users that are registering are working again. Thanks for your patience while we were solving this problem and a big thanks to fellow administrator Lefteris for finding what the problem exactly was.

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 that I have started a discussion on the forum to find out how you use the manual now and how useful it is to you. I am looking forward to hearing your feedback!

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. And the features people are missing are those that I had on my wishlist already. And of course there are always some nice new ideas, so I will put those on my wishlist as well.

I would like to put some more focus on two of the results that surprised me most. First the COLLADA DAE format seems a lot more popular than Google Earth KMZ to import models from Sketchup. I find this a little surprising, since I had expected KMZ was more popular. I think the advantage of KMZ is that the textures are contained in it as well, so you never loose them. But it seems most Sketchup users use COLLADA DAE files instead.

Another thing that surprised me even more is that import SCASM files and API macros is not popular at all. Even the recently added functionality to import COLLADA files is more popular already. Since I started developing this tool to convert my old API macros over to the FSX MDL format, I was a little surprised to see that most people perform other conversions with the tool. I guess you could almost say that the tool has a sort of mid-life crisis and is transforming into other functionalities as well.

Once again, thanks everybody for your feedback, it is really interesting to get an overview of how you use the tool!

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 my test objects still go wrong, but the majority works fine already. So if you find any trouble or have an object that does not yet work correctly, please let me know.

FSX temporarily sold out

To be honest I don’t know how long this announcement is on the FSInsider website already, but it seems that MS has run out of copies of FSX. The good news is that they are making new copies, so FSX should be available again at the end of May.

Since it is very important for the health of the FS community that the flight simulation platform can still be bought, I think this is good news. For developers there are still enough challenges to make even nicer addons, so let’s hope this keeps our community as active as usual for some time to come.

Sometimes you have to break some things…

While working on the drawcall minimizer functionality of ModelConverterX recently, I realized that I had to update the way I represent the textures internally in the tool. Try to add minimizer support for night textures and other subtexture types turned out to be must harder than it should be.

So I have now changed this in the ModelConverterX design. But since textures are just an important part of an object, it turned out that I had to modify quite some code (or you could also say that I had broken quite a bit of code). So I am now taking the time to test if everything is still working as it should. In the short term this costs some effort, but I am sure that in the long run this redesign will make it easier for me to add new functions.

Once I have finished the testing, finishing the drawcall minimizer should be a lot easier. I’ll let you know when it is done…

CFG tweaks and performance

Recently tweaking the FSX.cfg file to get better performance and solve some display problems has been a hot topic in the FS community. And now it seems Lefteris has made a nice little tool to assist in this tweaking. So check out his blog post for more details about the tweaking and the tool.