Hi Rick,
Thanks for the information. I do recall that the Optimized Tab had something to do with drawcalls because I watched one of Arno's videos discussing that. He didn't go into details about it but that's where I got the intell. It may take me awhile to understand what it's about. If I mess with them in MCX, I'm not going to compile it to FSX until I better understand it.
Ken, you are not going to understand the thing until you use it. Please do us a favor and think for yourself, do you see anyone else screaming in big red letters to not do something without knowing or saying why???????
Play with it, learn it, the absolute worst thing that can happen is that your model will be too shiny, or the windows will be too pink - what, pink windows, you don't believe me? No, ken, you can make that mirrored sunglass look, you know, when the glass is almost clear, slightly green (any color) and then when it gets a flash of sun it is a bright green streak. To explore this feature, you will want to work with pure polygon color - it is easier to see and understand this way - you will want the polygons to be able to be clear or translucent and you will want to play with the Material Editor Colors. In fact, this is great stuff and it is my hope we can all take a few minutes to learn why it is ok to play with material attributes. When you first import your model, it's material attributes will be those assigned by the modelling software. In the image below, the ambient color value will match the polygon color the model currently has. All three values are 204 and we can see it is a light bluish gray color.
You can change those numbers and the model color will change to conform. You can click on one of the boxes and set a custom specific color, which MCX will store for your forever use in one of the spare boxes below. Alternatively, you may select from a range of preconfigured colors like burnt sienna by selecting either the web or system tab.
Ok, so now we are quite comfortable selecting any one of the 16 million plus colors available and applying those to our polygons. Take a look at the little blue slider to the right of the color palette. The top represents full opacity and that value is not added to the three RGB values that define color. If you move the slider slightly and close the drop down window, you will see a fourth value has been added to the RGB field. Zero is full transparency and 255 is full opacity and you are free to assign any value in between. Here are two examples of transparent colored polygons:
Note that in real life, two panels of the control tower are opaque to protect the controllers from sun glare and we are able to reproduce that with this technique.
Now we go into a little more detail. Please refer to the color palette image above. You can see that I am discussing "ambient" color, but the field that is selected is "specular." Specular controls the shininess. Ambient is the normal color of your model, the color assigned by your modelling software. 255,255,255 is pure white. Back to specular, Your model above has a specular value of 0. You don't ever want to do that intentionally, imo, except maybe in a smoke stack funnel or something. Specular zero is the black hole of highlights and no virtual light escapes it. Even for military "non" reflective paint I use a specular value of 20.
Now let's play with those values even more. So far we have been using all three as the same, maybe adding a fourth as a little translucence. We already know what changing those numbers in relation to each other does to ambient color. Any guesses as to it's effect on shine? Yep, you can have blue, or gold or whatever color sun glints. Try black, that's really weird.
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There was no tutorial for these discoveries, no documentation I could find anywhere and I searched. There is none really necessary. It is all very straightforward, Arno is a wizard himself in how he lay's out these menu's and window's and it's all fairly self explanatory. What isn't self explanatory is consistent with the RGB tables with simple intuitive extensions. I like simple.
Ok, I think that about covers it for the material attributes and now here's the bad news. We have already discussed the advantages of mapped textures over polygon colors, material attributes are trumped by any texture assigned to that field:
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I didn't really want to go into the differences between polygon color and mapped textures, but I can see it might be expedient. Let's use the example of some tanks and stuff, because I like to model those, as part of my plans for global dominion. Just kidding, I love to model them. Just kidding again.
Here's the big bad DF-21 that changed global policy. They were so proud of it in fact, that an overzealous spot light blasted the thing with a glaring contrast. The gaffer probably got sent to a reeducation camp to make Christmas ornaments. You can see the effects just aft of the cab:
Here is the texture:
This is a model with a photographic texture mapped directly to it. Now you may suspect that it would be impossible to do with only the one photograph and you would probably be right. This model is composed of several textures, but they
were not required.
Here is a photo textured model where the photo was edited extensively to facilitate projecting onto the model. It also, incidentally, contains tinted translucent polygons:
Now look carefully at the tail numbers. This is a trick I developed myself, to avoid the reversed characters that result from projecting photographic textures. I won't describe the process, but everything is there and you can download the model from my warehouse and explore yourself, I encourage you to.
Now I will explain a little bit how mapped textures can substitute for polygon color. In the image above, there is a LOT of unused real estate. Would it not make sense to add every part, indeed every color to some portion of the texture sheet, so that I could move it, expand it and color every polygon exactly as I please? Kind of like this:
In order to create this:
You may notice some details are missing like the tail lights or the varmint sticker, I use layered photoshop textures for simplicity and those particular layers were switched off for the screen capture.
I need to say this about optimizing, by and large, ignore it. It does not help you learn attributes, it applies attributes, without explaining them, that you need to know the meaning of before applying them. What it considers green is arbitrary, based on a probability algorithm. It is YOUR model, you know what YOUR green is, learn it and stick to it. I never use the optimizer as my main tool because it adds work, it does not remove it. Bottom like is that there is no one size fits all, no ideal attribute and the implication that the optimizer will establish this is false. Please reread this paragraph:
Finally, like many of the wonderful tools Arno provides, the optimize window is a short cut. You will really want to learn all these attributes, what they mean and do, experiment with them! Because then you will see the differences in the materials attribute window itself, where you should have your nose and pardon the joke
and you will not need the broad sweeping crutch of the one-or-the-other attributes matching.
Now that we have learned about defining polygons, let's expand on this. We already know the render is limited and it is burdened by both draw calls and polygon count. Because of this, we only define polygons that are seen, untextured/uncolored polygons do not render. If we create a cylinder, the interior should be transparent in order to conserve render resources for other visible areas. A glitch of the simulator removes visibility of ALL defined polygons behind an untextured polygon. If you took that same cylinder and added a window of colored or textured polygons, the inside would remain invisible and so would any model behind those invisible polygons. This could be a problem in the case of an airplane canopy connected to an untextured interior. The easy solution would be to texture the interior, however that would add many hundreds of polygons to the render that aren't really seen. How might you solve it?
The optimize window is an attempt to reduce draw calls by matching material attributes to the texture. In two simple examples, you may have a mapped texture of an automobile. Now the polygons of the transparent windshield may very likely have different material attributes from the body, namely attributes that make the polygons transparent. In that situation you would chose neither pane. The green one would probably be set default opaque and the pink one would be set default transparent; if you selected either, all polygons would be assigned that attribute.
