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My first attempt at "modeling"

dazz

dazz

Hi guys.
Just recently started googling info about scenery design when a friend asked me if I could add Lead-in lights for his Aerosoft Madeira X in the day time.
I succesfully added them using Special Effects, but then at night you get both effects overlapping and it doesn't look good.
fsdeveloper.com has been a great source of info. I thought that I could build a 3D model in gmax, and then tweak the model to only show up during the day. But just now realised that MDL Tweaker doesn't work with FSX models.... is there an alternative way to do this please?
I already have the model, with the attach points and the effects linked to them and they show in FSX, but when I zoom in they disapear, also from certain angles the effects are not visible, and the bounding box of the model appears out of the blue, even though I set the texture's opacity to 0%

Thanks in advance

Dario
 
dazz

dazz

Ok, I found I needed to convert the model to FS9 with MDL Converter and the FS9 makeMDL. I also solved the issue where the box would show by setting the scale to 0.
Finally discovered why the effects disappear. I have a simple model that triggers o effect. The effect consists on a series of lights, and when the first light where the model is located gets out of the field of view, all the effects attached to it are switched off. Guess I can fix that placing a box for each light
 
tgibson

tgibson

Resource contributor
Hi,

Increasing the size of the Bounding Box (in Object Information) will minimize this "disappearing" effect.

Hope this helps,
 
dazz

dazz

tgibson said:
Hi,

Increasing the size of the Bounding Box (in Object Information) will minimize this "disappearing" effect.

Hope this helps,
Click to expand...

Thank you tgibson.
Finally I placed a tiny 0.001x0.001x0.001 box at each lead in light, and a 0.002x0.002x0.002 bounding box with the attach point. That makes the boxes too small to show up even if I zoom in really close. The problem with making the bounding box bigger is that it wouldn't be transparent. Not sure what I was doing wrong, but placing a standard texture with 0% opacity wasn't making the box transparent. I also tried hiding all the boxes to no avail.

Now I got the models exported to FS9 MDL and have added the condition to only display during the day. Trying to figure out how to place the model in FSX now with Wishplacer
 
dazz

dazz

It was a lot easier than that. I found about the EffectParams in the SDK and simply adding effectParams="DAY=1" to the xml did the trick even without the 3D model.
Might as well try some LOD's now
 
tgibson

tgibson

Resource contributor
?? A bounding box is invisible. You set it in MDL Tweaker - Object Information.

Hope this helps,
 
arno

arno

Administrator
Staff member
FSDevConf team
Resource contributor
You will have to use FS2004 MDL files if you want to add conditions on the display of the object. The FSX MDL format has no support for that.
 
dazz

dazz

arno said:
You will have to use FS2004 MDL files if you want to add conditions on the display of the object. The FSX MDL format has no support for that.
Click to expand...

Been trying to do that with Whisplacer. No luck so far. Maybe with Instant Scenery

EDIT: It worked with SBuilderX. :)

tgibson said:
Hi,

I increased the bounding box to -100, -100, -100 and 100, 100, 100.

More of this discussion is here (it relates to ramp light splashes on the ground):

http://www.fsdeveloper.com/forum/showthread.php?t=77873&highlight=ramp+light&page=2

Hope this helps,
Click to expand...

Thanks again Tom. MDL Converter (material editor) worked to make the box transparent

That link contains some great info
 
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