ModelConverterX video tutorial

Just a little reminder that in two days there will be an online video tutorial about ModelConverterX. I think tutorial I will give a quick introduction to the tool and after that I will show how you can use it to convert old API macros into FSX MDL files or how to import them into GMax for further editing.

So you are all invited to join this tutorial on Saturday 2nd of January at 20:00 CET on the FSDeveloper Livestream channel. See you there! And if you can’t make it the tutorial will be available on the Wiki afterwards as well.

gPoly status update #4

Time for another gPoly status update, today I have made some good progress on the tool again. The first part I have finished is the display of the GeoTIFF background image, this code seems to be quite optimal now, so that even with big images you can pan and zoom without too much delay. What I still have to do is verify the accuracy of the geo position, I think I need to render some reference information (of which I know the position) over it to do this. Another related feature on the todo list is the ability to make images georeferenced when they are not yet.

Today I also worked quite a bit on the user interface, especially the part that allows you to manipulate the layers in the project. Each layer can hold a background image or a set of features (polygons, lines, etc). Below is the screenshot of the current status.

gPoly status update #3

This evening I continued on the gPoly tool. The focus was again on the display of the background images, since they are a very important feature when drawing ground features or when checking if they are in the right location. I made some good progress and for small to medium sized airports it is working fine now.

But when I try to load the high resolution background image I have of Schiphol things go less smooth, especially when you zoom in far and the highest resolution needs to be loaded. So there is still some work to be done when selecting the resolution that should be displayed, but progress is being made. I should note that the background image of Schiphol is a GeoTIFF of almost 4 GB in size, so it should be expected that things will never be super smooth when working with such a big file.

Day or night?

Tonight I have added a nice little feature to ModelConverterX again (it will be in the 1.2 development release tomorrow). You might wonder what it is? You can now choose to render your object in day or night view. The night view allows you to preview the night textures. Here is a little screenshot of one of the default objects.

It is not yet finished, since I just display the night texture now. Whether it is a nightmap or a lightmap is not yet taken into consideration. So that gives some room for future improvement. But this will allow you to check how the object would look during the night.

ModelConverterX 1.1 available

Just a quick note that a new stable version of ModelConverterX is available. If you have been using the development release lately there is not so much changed, but compared to the last stable release there are loads of improvements. I have also updated the user manual.

For the coming time the development of ModelConverterX will be slowed down a bit, since I plan to focus more on the gPoly tool.

A sunday morning experiment

By default landclass is defined as grid data within FSX, so that means that for each area of roughly 1.2 x 1.2 kilometre you can define what kind of land usage it has. For some time already I wanted to test what effect landclass polygons would have on the looks of the terrain, so this morning I gave it a try.

I had some land usage data for the Netherlands available, which gives the type of land usage as vector polygons. So I wrote a quite translation tool to map those values on FSX landclass GUIDs. Below is a screenshot of the results in FSX. As you can see more detail becomes visible in the terrain, like smaller forest areas, dunes and beaches. Also towns and cities appear clearer at the location where they are in real world.

In the screenshot you can also see that the mapping is not always perfect yet (for example the dunes became sand as well), but for a quick sunday morning experiment I am quite happy with the results. If I could find some land usage data I could use freely (unfortunately that is not the case with the data I used in this test case), then this could be an interesting approach to make the terrain more recognisable without using huge aerial imagery.

Render modes

Today I have added some more options to ModelConverterX, this time different render modes for the preview. Before you could only render the object as it would show in FS, but now you also have the option to only show the faces (no textures) or to show a wireframe view of the object. I some cases these different render modes might help to figure out what is going on with your model.

As you might have noticed I am trying to fix some of the open issues with ModelConverterX, so that I can release another stable version. Apart from a few items the list for version 1.1 is empty now, so after that I will focus more on the gPoly tool.