Ground Polygon - issue

[corkyo4]

I have tried to compile my first ground first ground polygon. However in the first instance MCX is telling me that my texture are not at ground level.

I was under the impression when i drew them in sketchup they were. The option to use the lower polygon to ground button didnt resolve this error. Instead i deleted all non-ground polygons, compiled the BGL and copied it to my active scenery folder.

The result, the area where my ground polygon is active is simply black.

Can anyone help

Thanks

Tom

 

[arno]

Hi Tom,

Now that I think more about it, I think it makes not that much sense to make the user lower the polygons if they are not exactly on the ground. I should probably just do that by default.

Did you also convert the textures? SketchUp made objects use JPG textures. So you will have to convert them to DDS or extended BMP to use them in FS. Else your polygons will show up un-textured (and often black).

 

[corkyo4]

Hi Tom,

Now that I think more about it, I think it makes not that much sense to make the user lower the polygons if they are not exactly on the ground. I should probably just do that by default.

Did you also convert the textures? SketchUp made objects use JPG textures. So you will have to convert them to DDS or extended BMP to use them in FS. Else your polygons will show up un-textured (and often black).

Arno thanks for the reponse. I thought this might also be the issue ie not converting the textures. In MCX there is the option to do this for a normal model and MCX exports the textures and model correctly linked and working etc.

But with the polygon creator it seems that is is not possible to do this in the same way. I tried to load a DDS file into sketchup but it wont accept it, how can i ensure that i use a DDS file in the polygon BGL?

Tom

 

[arno]

Hi Tom,

After you have loaded your ground polygons in the ground polygon wizard you can still use the mass texture editor tool in ModelConverterX to convert the textures. It will also work on the loaded ground polygons.

 

[corkyo4]

Hi Tom,

After you have loaded your ground polygons in the ground polygon wizard you can still use the mass texture editor tool in ModelConverterX to convert the textures. It will also work on the loaded ground polygons.

Great ill give it a go when i get a spare minute.

Tom

 

[corkyo4]

Hmm,

Well i havent got this to work as intended. For now i simply created an MDL file and loaded in to a scenery library. But this is not ideal.

Are there any other methods with which to create ground polygons?

Simpler the better (i presume the MCX method is as easy as it gets)

Tom

 

[tgibson]

How did you intend it to work?

 

[corkyo4]

Ideally compiling a BGL file through MCX. But having no experience of ground poly's i have no idea what other methods there are.

I used SbuilderX to create a photo real background and in reality this is essentially a ground polygon. SBX creates a BGL of this too.

The process i have used so far.

1. Load a photo in to sketchup and trace around it to draw the polygon i need. Applied the textures and just to make sure it is set to 0 altitude i have imported a model i drew in to skethup and aligned it all to that.

2. Export as KMZ file

3. Open MCX and load the KMZ file in to MCX through the G Polygon Wizard. I click the lower polygons to ground button and nothing seems to happen (presumably because they are at ground level)

4. Click the convert button and copy the BGL file to my FSX scenery folder. In addition (although i didnt think you needed to do this for a BGL) i used MCX to create a DDS file of the texture used in my G Polygon and copied this to my texture folder of my active scenery folder.

5. Load FSX and Bang a Black area results.

Just to confused things further when clicking the lower ground polygons button nothing happens as mentioned but when clicking (as a test) to filter out raised polygons half of the area disappears. When clicking convert i am told my polygons arent at ground level do i want to continue (i do continue).

I presume there is a problem with my sketchup file i.e. my polygon is not at ground level, but since i have aligned it all to what i thought was ground level, im at a loss as to explain why this is going wrong.

Tried to get GMax to work, but i have no idea what im doing on that.

EDIT:

I have tried a different method, using MCX to convert the KMZ file to an MDL file with converted textures (DDS format). The MDL file was then reimported back in to MCX using the ground polygon wizard, strangely there are two textures associated with the model despite me only using 1, so i select layer 4 for the one i know to be a true texture, convert the file to BGL load in to FSX and still the same problem arises.

EDIT:

Its working now, i didnt realise you still need to load the texture file in to FSX aswell, i assumed the textures were incorporated in to the BGL, similar to the methods SBX does it.

Superb!!

Tom

 

[tgibson]

Glad you figured it out. SBuilder is creating photoscenery (where the images are stored in the BGL files); you are creating a scenery object in MCX (i.e. a polygon), and for those you also need to have the texture file in FSX - it's just the same thing as creating an airplane or a scenery building.

I would use photoscenery for most everything you can, and then use MCX ground polygons only for things you want in high resolution.

Hope this helps,

 

[arno]

Hi,

Glad to hear you got it working now.

And also thanks for reporting your experiences with the wizard, this gives me some ideas to improve it in the future. I will try to make those filter/lower functions more automatic. And I think adding an option to automatically convert the textures would also be good (the convert and place object wizard has that already).