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Adding LOD to MDL objects

J

jgoggi

Messages
21
Country
italy
Hi, I have an FSX scenery of a city with MDL files representing each a group of 3D buildings. I am completely unaware of how things work in developing sceneries, anyway my problem is that those buildings suddenly appear when I am few miles from the city and the visual effect is of course not good. In order to try and have the buildings appear from a farther distance, I thought they would need more LODs and I edited them with Model Converter X. Indeed I see that they have only LOD 100. I tried to add LOD 40 and 20 (by the way, both LOD 40 and 20 calculation result in the same amount of triangles of LOD 100, shouldn't it be lower?) and to export the resulting MDL. The file size is bigger, but I don't see any difference, the scenery suddenly pops up few miles out. If I edit again those modified MDLs with MCX, again I see that only LOD 100 is present, so those LOD 40 and 20 are not saved. Can you please tell me if by adding LODs I will get the effect of the buildings loading when I am still far from them and explain how to add LODs to those MDL files with MCX? Thank you very much.
James
 
E

edphipps

Messages
1,005
Country
us-florida
Models with different LODs have in fact separate models with lower numbers of polygons. You would create say three versions of the same model with more complexity and more polygons in each succeeding version. These would be combined into one model with separate LODs of 20, 40, and 100 for example. MCX can create a model with a lower LOD by using the Generate LODs icon below the Wizards drop down box. If you used this feature of MCX and did not get an additional model with a lower number of polygons then probably it's because the process MCX uses could not lower the polygon count in an except able manor.
Ed
 
tgibson

tgibson

Resource contributor
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11,344
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us-california
I doubt that LODs with a lower number are going to do anything for your "pop up at a distance" problem because that is a separate problem, possibly related to the fact that you grouped buildings together into a large assembly. In your case they all appear at once, causing the eye to go WOW! If they were separate objects they may appear more gradually, and thus not being so obvious when they appear?
 
arno

arno

Administrator
Staff member
FSDevConf team
Resource contributor
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32,886
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netherlands
Hi,

I also don't think that added LODs will make them appear from further out. That's mainly influenced by the size of the object. You might want to check what bounding box sizes have been set for the object.

If you created extra LODs, but don't see them after export, it sounds like something went wrong when exporting to BGL again.
 
J

jgoggi

Messages
21
Country
italy
Hi, thanks for your replies. Concerning bounding boxes, how should they be modified in order to have the objects appearing from a afrther distance? Should they be smaller? Is there a way to modify the boxes with MCX? I also tried to export the MDL objects into BGL, but those BGL objects don't appear in the simulator, they should only be MDL. Thanks.
 
tgibson

tgibson

Resource contributor
Messages
11,344
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us-california
I would assume that larger bounding boxes would appear from further distances, but I've never tested that.
 
J

jgoggi

Messages
21
Country
italy
Thanks. I did not succeed in changing boxes dimensions with MCX. Could you please tell me how to do that? Thank you!
 
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