FSXA Converting FSX objects to XP11

[FlyingAxx]

After decades of using MSFS products I recently installed XP11 parallel to my aged FSXA. I'd tried before v5 and v7, both with quite ambivalent impressions. However, the flight behaviour and even the visible environment are promising - even if the handling is quite different (yoke settings and keyboard shortcuts are a real hurdle). The best of all, the whole thing is not restricted to one specific OS (I mean the one becoming more and more intrusive).

However, the possibility of baking sceneries based on OSM data with often nicely fitting autogen and a surprisingly well sorted selection of freeware and tools made me starting to pimp again the available sceneries. I started with my own home city (Berlin) and enhanced it with free scenery overlays containing quite a bunch of landmarks. However, looking closer after the object data, I detected, that most objects had been split into several parts. The same happened when using MCX in order to extract the one or other FSX-object, because of its use of more than one material. Finally I decided using the MCX material manager and tried to unify those materials into one single texture sheet - unfortunately with no avail...

According to the visual feedback from MCX it seemed to work, but when exporting the result to X-Plane obj-format, the split still happened. Even if both models seemed to be identically, they had slightly different texture sheets, obviously separated from the one existing source. Both models looked nice in MCX, but appeared black in the sim (and before in the World Editor). BTW, in some cases, even single materials (and texture sheets) sometimes had been cluttered in a strange way after the conversion (window and doors as roof textures an/or a texture potpourry on facades).

Well, all I'd been able to find was a way via the use of Blender. But honestly, without a profound knowledge of modelling it seems to be a Herculean task and absolutely beyond my horizon of understanding at the moment. I'm even not able interpreting the parameters of the related materials. Nonetheless I think I could use gimp in order to bake the proper sheets if someone would give me a hint what to do.

Now my questions:

• Is there any way using MCX in order to bake compliant materials/textures?
• Alternatively, can MCX be handy to unify separated objects to one (that works)? - This might lead finally to the same question as above.

(BTW, a last remark: It's just to satisfy my curiosity and for my private use.)

 

[arno]

Hi,

The drawcall minimizer is the function that tries to put all textures on one sheet. But. If it will succeed depends on the model. If there are too many textures or if some are tiled a lot it might not be possible.

After running the drawcall minimizer you need to save the newly created texture to disk in the material editor. Afterwards you can export the model.

 

[FlyingAxx]

Hi,

The drawcall minimizer is the function that tries to put all textures on one sheet. But. If it will succeed depends on the model. If there are too many textures or if some are tiled a lot it might not be possible.

After running the drawcall minimizer you need to save the newly created texture to disk in the material editor. Afterwards you can export the model.

Hi Arno,

Thanks for answering. Your proposal describes exactly what I did. Probably XP11 wasn't able deciphering the resulting texture sheet. I'm still at the very beginning and know about nothing as far as preconditions or limitations are concerned. Probably the texture format, rectangular and not quadratic, might have caused the problem.

Keep healthy!