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ModelconverterX Drawcalls giving weird results

B

BkdaleFS9

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36
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us-ohio
Hello all,

I have been trying to make a causeway bridge across an area of Florida (FS9 Scenery) but I am getting less than satisfactory results from ModelConverterX.

I designed the causeway in SketchUp using very few bitmaps to paint it. In fact, I kept the size of the bitmaps very small as I did not need detail.

The problem I'm having in MCX is that when I try and reduce the drawcalls in MCX it keeps reducing it to 3. Not acceptable considering the textures are so small. Should reduce it to 1 drawcall. Look at the images provided. Makes zero sense to me. One texture it makes is 1024x1024 with a very little texture in the corner. Fill up the sheet. ;)

Pictures HERE and thank you anyone who can shed light on this.
 
As far as I know FS9 does not take any great advantage of reduced drawcalls. That became much more important with FSX. Of course it’s always a good idea to reduce the overall texture load, but I’ve never seen any real data that the number of textures make a huge difference to FS9.
 
Thanks Tom. I'm just basing my concern over what a couple of very good designers in FS9 scenery always stressed. That drawcalls put way more strain on a GPU than textures do. I always strive to reduce to 1 unless it is an entire terminal for example. Even then it normally goes above 4.

But my original question still remains. Why is MCX not filling the sheet or at least putting a couple of the small 64X64 textures together?
 
There could be several reasons, here are two possibilities.

If the texture is tiled in any way, it cannot be combined. Sometimes this can be even an accidental wrap around mapping of a single texture.

Incompatible texture types would not be able to be combined?
 
Mr. Gibson, this from Google:

AI Overview

Yes, FS9 (Microsoft Flight Simulator 2004) significantly benefits from fewer and smaller draw calls. [1, 2]
FSDeveloper +1

Arno "Less drawcalls is always better for the performance of the graphics card".
 
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ModelConverterX also has an option to include tiled textures when minimizing draw calls. It will then copy the tiled texture multiple times into the resulting texture.

This only works well if the texture is tiled a few tines. If it is repeated dozens of times it would be a waste of texture space of course.

In FS2004 you can also use colored material without any textures. Sometimes that is also a good approach.
 
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