• 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.

Convert model format M3D and/or GR2?

L

luminarycrush

Messages
13
Country
us-california
Hi,

The M3D format seems to be a universal format to store model in to make exchange easier. That might be a useful to support in MCX. But if you found M3D files in CFS3 I think that might be another format, since the Model 3D format does not seem to be that old.

As for the GR2 format you list, that seems to be for Civilization Beyond Earth, why would it be useful to support that for FS?
 
.M3D as used in CFS3 is not open-source, nor is it documented. We wished it would be, but it never happened.
 
Re: GR2, there are a lot of games that use that format which have a variety of vehicles and scenes/buildings that are sometimes pretty good poly count - it's not specific to CivBE, but someone there made some tools to manipulate it.. unfortunately, they are a bit old and don't work with some newer versions of that model standard.
I've used Silent Hunter as a source of ships, but SH5 stores in this GR2 format, which was why I asked this question.
 
Hi,

OK, so we can conclude that reading the M3D format is not going to work.

For the GR2 format I will add it to the wishlist. But I could not yet find a good documentation of the format. That might make implementing it hard. All I found is this:

github.com

File Format documentation · arves100/opengr2 Wiki

C IO library for RAD Granny2 file format. Contribute to arves100/opengr2 development by creating an account on GitHub.
github.com github.com
 
So once it's exported you could never get it back into Gmax or any other tool to modify? You'd have to have the original Gmax file?
 
luminarycrush said:
So once it's exported you could never get it back into Gmax or any other tool to modify? You'd have to have the original Gmax file?
Click to expand...
Yes, as is often the case with proprietary formats used in games. For the FS MDL format we have worked out the format as community so we are not in that situation, but I think the CFS3 community is too small now to expect this format still to be worked out.
 
arno said:
Yes, as is often the case with proprietary formats used in games. For the FS MDL format we have worked out the format as community so we are not in that situation, but I think the CFS3 community is too small now to expect this format still to be worked out.
Click to expand...
Although Arno’s sterling MCX allows us to access the mesh of a compiled model, it doesn’t give us the hierarchy of objects as originally built in Gmax, 3dsMax, Blender etc. There’s a lot of work to reorganise the recovered mesh as a useable aircraft model for recompiling (except CFS3 mesh). Scenery objects are less demanding.
 
The mdl format simply does not store the gmax hierarchy and objects. They are optimized on export and therefore can't be recovered.
It's always best to keep your sources :D
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top