• Which the release of FS2020 we see an explosition of activity on the forun and of course we are very happy to see this. But having all questions about FS2020 in one forum becomes a bit messy. So therefore we would like to ask you all to use the following guidelines when posting your questions:

    • Tag FS2020 specific questions with the MSFS2020 tag.
    • Questions about making 3D assets can be posted in the 3D asset design forum. Either post them in the subforum of the modelling tool you use or in the general forum if they are general.
    • Questions about aircraft design can be posted in the Aircraft design forum
    • Questions about airport design can be posted in the FS2020 airport design forum. Once airport development tools have been updated for FS2020 you can post tool speciifc questions in the subforums of those tools as well of course.
    • Questions about terrain design can be posted in the FS2020 terrain design forum.
    • Questions about SimConnect can be posted in the SimConnect forum.

    Any other question that is not specific to an aspect of development or tool can be posted in the General chat forum.

    By following these guidelines we make sure that the forums remain easy to read for everybody and also that the right people can find your post to answer it.

Batch Convertor

Messages
110
I want to use the batch convertor to add night textures to a model. I'm not sure when this should be done. Say I have already converted a sketchup model to an FSX .mdl file. If I use the batch convertor to add night textures will it not overwrite the existing model? I'm not sure how this is supposed to work without overwriting the existing .mdl file.

I'm using the development version of MCX and am having trouble with changing files from jpg to dds. In the other version of MCX I would eliminate drawcalls and then convert textures and have everything nice and neat in the directory I pointed too. In the development version if I eliminate drawcalls first it dumps those files into the directory I point it to but I have no idea what files it used in that process. Therefore, after I convert textures from jpg to dds I just have a huge folder of dds files. All of the ones that were converted plus the ones that were generated from minimizing drawcalls.

NOTE* I just figured this out and finally got it to working. :) Was going in the wrong order somehow.


It also appears that in the development version it misses or is messing something up during the minimize drawcall function as I usually have 1-5 textures missing when placing the bgl generated into FSX. If I don't minimize drawcalls and just move all the files in the texture folder then everything displays correctly.

Maybe I'm just not following the process correctly. Any help would be appreciated.

Thanks
-Kevin
 
Last edited:
Hi Kevin,

If you only want to update one model at a time, using the material editor is better than the batch convert wizard. That last wizard is only to process multiple files at once.

The latest development releases indeed save more texture files than needed. This has been reported in the forum already and I will try to improve that soon.

What I would do is this:

1. Open the model
2. Go to the material editor. You can apply the material template to add night textures to your materials there.
3. If needed convert textures to other format and reduce drawcalls.
4. Save object to mdl

Be aware that you need to make the night textures yourself, the tool only adds a reference to them, but does not create the files.
 
Hi Kevin,

If you only want to update one model at a time, using the material editor is better than the batch convert wizard. That last wizard is only to process multiple files at once.

The latest development releases indeed save more texture files than needed. This has been reported in the forum already and I will try to improve that soon.

What I would do is this:

1. Open the model
2. Go to the material editor. You can apply the material template to add night textures to your materials there.
3. If needed convert textures to other format and reduce drawcalls.
4. Save object to mdl

Be aware that you need to make the night textures yourself, the tool only adds a reference to them, but does not create the files.

Thank you! I just actually figured it out. I do the batch conversion, then open the mdl file and then do drawcalls and texture conversion. Saves a lot of time that for sure. Thanks again!
 
After a little more investigation on minimizing drawcalls. Its placing some vertical files horizontally after initiating minimizing drawcalls. I can email you the offending model if you'd like. It only has 20 texture files (including LM) and its a pretty basic structure. It only seems to do it with the night textures.

I've done 3 more models and it's applying at least 2 per model (only night textures) horizontally instead of vertically.
 
Last edited:
Hi,

If you can send me a model to debug that would be very useful.
 
Hi,

I found the bug with minimizing the drawcalls and the night texture being wrong sometimes. It's fixed in the next development release.
 
Back
Top