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Adding shine with MCX?

D

Dimus

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96
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greece
Hi all!

This is my first post here but a lot of threads have helped me a lot through my first airport scenery design project, which is my real life home base LGTT, Tatoi, north of Athens. At first I only wished to correct the location and AFCAD and used ADE which was easy and straightforward. then tried to add buildings using stock objects but somehow this was not good enough so I bumped into google sketchup tutorials and started ceating my own buildings using photographs of the place. I am now very close to finishing it and I am working on the main gate where a gate guardian F-84 is placed. Not wanting to get into gmax at the moment I managed to create a low poly model of the plane in sketchup, which converted nicely with ModelconverterX. It is painted plainly using a base aluminium texture in dds format. I was wondering if it is possible to make it shiny within modelconverter's material editor or I have to add an alpha channel to the texture. If that is so, what is the parameter that I must use to do this.

On a similar note, I also wish to make the windows of the control tower (also created in sketchup) semi transparent, shiny and reflective. I have chosen a transparent texture in sketchup with an opacity of 98% (I need the windows to be almost opaque) but when put into FSX, the windows show almost transparent with only a slight tint. Any ideas on that?

My apologies for the long post. I have seen these matters discussed also in other threads but were a bit too technical for my beginner's eyes. I'd appreciate any suggestions, these two are the last bits of this project which has been a long first one for me.
 
Hi,

Welcome to the forum :).

Let me start with the last question, since that one is easier.

To get the window transparent it is easiest to give it an alpha channel. All that is required then is to press the "Set Default Transparent" button in the material editor.

Or did you use a normal texture in SketchUp with a opacity value for the entire material? I would have to test if that works correctly when converting. It might be a little bug.

Then to the reflection. The examples from the SDK could help you to see what kind of material settings are needed. I know this question has been asked before, I guess it would be a good subject for a ModelConverterX tutorial. Unfortunately I do not know the answer directly.
 
Thanks arno!

Actually I have used one of the sketchup textures in the "transluscent" group but increased the darkness and opacity from within sketchup. Actually it was just a flat gray colour so sketchup did not export a texture. I will try using a texture with an alpha channel.

Can you please tell me where I can find the examples in SDK? I haven't explored it much yet. Will these be in a format I can load in MCX and then observe the settings in the material editor?

Thanks again!:wave:
 
Dimus said:
Thanks arno!

Actually I have used one of the sketchup textures in the "transluscent" group but increased the darkness and opacity from within sketchup. Actually it was just a flat gray colour so sketchup did not export a texture. I will try using a texture with an alpha channel.

Can you please tell me where I can find the examples in SDK? I haven't explored it much yet. Will these be in a format I can load in MCX and then observe the settings in the material editor?

Thanks again!:wave:
Click to expand...

Welcome to the site/forum! The SDK is located if installed by the default.. look under Microsoft Games and Flight Simulator X should be an additional folder for Flight Simulator SDK then search under any of the keywords in question... such as emissive or alpha etc. Specifically look for FSX Materials or base material properties.


Hope it helps!
 
Last edited:
Hi,

As Doug already mentioned I meant the section of the SDK named "FSX material" that explains the material settings. The samples are given as text/images, not as models you can load.
 
Thanks! I found that and it helped clear a lot of stuff in my understanding of things. Now moving on to finishing this.:)
 
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