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A few questions

V

vcimmino

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7
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italy
Hello Arno,
I wanted to have some clues on a few parameters/tools in ModelconverterX. I hope you can give a bit indepth for those.

1) To start with I wanted to ask what happens when big ojects are moved from their original position inside MCX. What I get is that if I center (or even move) such objects I get a light changing on textures and this change is reflected on FSX too. What I mean is that I have one side of the objects correctly lighted and the opposite sides somewhat darkened, like a directional light source was applied to them. I would like to have them correctly lit up wherever I move them.

2) Can you please explain the meaning of some parameters in the options settings of MCX? The user manual doesen't explain them a lot.

DrawcallBatching
ZBiasOffset

3)I'm still trying to solve a problem with LODs and big, complex, multiple objects organized as a scene (think at a block of buildings). Often even if I create LODs for them I don't get them visualized in FSX. The strange thing is that while I place them through Wishplacer I correctly see the LODs applied, but once I save the bgl and reload FSX those LOD changes don't happen anymore for the related objects. I came out to a partial solution, by perfectly centering objects in MCX before saving (maybe the reference point means something if it lays outside the model's bounding box or moved from the center) but even in this case it is like an odd. Sometimes it works sometimes not... Any information you have about it is really wellcome.

4) About textures/drawcalls minimizing: Is there a way to optimize it so that it merges more textures togheter? Even if I have like 30-40 256x256 textures in a model, most of times it only merges 2-3 in a 1024x1024 and others are left as are. You know that drawcall minimizing is quite important for FSX performance so this would be a nice improvement to get further optimized models.

Thanks a lot and sorry for the long questions.
 
Hi,

vcimmino said:
1) To start with I wanted to ask what happens when big ojects are moved from their original position inside MCX. What I get is that if I center (or even move) such objects I get a light changing on textures and this change is reflected on FSX too. What I mean is that I have one side of the objects correctly lighted and the opposite sides somewhat darkened, like a directional light source was applied to them. I would like to have them correctly lit up wherever I move them.
Click to expand...

Moving the object should not have such an effect. You are seeing this when you just translate the object? Let me try to see if I can reproduce that.

vcimmino said:
2) Can you please explain the meaning of some parameters in the options settings of MCX? The user manual doesen't explain them a lot.

DrawcallBatching
ZBiasOffset
Click to expand...

DrawcallBatching specifies whether drawcall batching or LODs have preference when exporting. When this value is true drawcall batching will also work for objects with LODs (but as a downside the LODs no longer work). With the default value of false you get drawcall batching for objects without LODs, but for objects with LODs the LODs still work.

In FSX there is no zbias command as before. So what I do is apply an offset in the direction of their normal to these polygons. ZBiasOffset specifies this offset (it is multiplied by the zbias value).

vcimmino said:
3)I'm still trying to solve a problem with LODs and big, complex, multiple objects organized as a scene (think at a block of buildings). Often even if I create LODs for them I don't get them visualized in FSX. The strange thing is that while I place them through Wishplacer I correctly see the LODs applied, but once I save the bgl and reload FSX those LOD changes don't happen anymore for the related objects. I came out to a partial solution, by perfectly centering objects in MCX before saving (maybe the reference point means something if it lays outside the model's bounding box or moved from the center) but even in this case it is like an odd. Sometimes it works sometimes not... Any information you have about it is really wellcome.
Click to expand...

If you changed the drawcallbatching option, as discussed above, that can have an influence.

I don''t know which LODs values you used, but for big objects it could be that the switching happens later than you expect.

vcimmino said:
4) About textures/drawcalls minimizing: Is there a way to optimize it so that it merges more textures togheter? Even if I have like 30-40 256x256 textures in a model, most of times it only merges 2-3 in a 1024x1024 and others are left as are. You know that drawcall minimizing is quite important for FSX performance so this would be a nice improvement to get further optimized models.
Click to expand...

When the texture is tiling, the tool can not minimize them. So the best way to make sure the minimizing works is to be careful when mapping your textures and don't tile them if not needed.

I hope that helps,
 
Hi Arno,
yes the darkening happens even if just translating. Let me know if you can reproduce it else I can post a couple images of what happens before and after translation.

About the LODs problem, I didn't change yet those parameters I asked about. I was just curious to know the way they would have affected the model export. I'm using 250-100-60 as LOD values for those. Strange that for similar sized objects some work and some not. I'll try different ways.

Thanks for tiling suggestion. I'll work to optimize textures so that they don't need a tiling.
 
Hi,

Which version are you using? I had a look at the issue with the polygons being shaded differently and I can't reproduce it here. But I also remember that a few weeks ago I fixed a small bug that might have an influence on this. So are you using the latest development release or not?
 
Thanks...!
Looks like I was using an interim version that had that bug. Last one looks like works with shading correctly when moving such objects.
 
Good to hear that :)
 
Hi,

Well, I do have this problem still. Let me explain.
I import an object (in my case a ferry boat) and I have to rotate it 90º and lower it 2 meters. When lowering it all the textures darken.
I use this object as a LOD 40 and import it in the LOD 100 model. When some distance away from the object (when the LOD 40 model appears) the textures indeed darken in FSX as well.
I use the latest dev. rel.
 
Hi Roby,

When you look at the normals after transforming the object, do you see that the normals are not pointing away from the polygon as they do before?
 
Hi Arno,

Probably a stupid question but how do I know if the normals are pointing away?
The only thing I see is that there are a lot less normals when changing to a lower LOD, and they are all pointing downwards.
And then I wanted to check if the same was true for the night textures but MCX crashed.
 
Last edited:
Hi,

All pointing downwards does not sound good. I think that is the bug you are seeing. How did you create the LOD?
 
Hello Arno,

I imported the LOD 40 as a new mdl/dae by just eliminating a whole lot of details of the original model and for the LOD16 I let MCX calculate it automatically from the LOD40.
 
Hi Roby,

And are those normals wrong directly after import or later after you did some manipulations? Seems like they are changed somewhere in an incorrect way.
 
Directly after import I think because putting in the LODs was the last thing I did except for having to "photoshop" the textures once more (you know, restoring the texture colors once more because they change a bit each time) and the darkening already happened visually and straight away in MCX.
 
Hi,

Can you send me the LOD 40 file for debugging?
 
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