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P3D v4 Spot light MDL file re-read

tsgucci

tsgucci

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482
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hungary
Hi Arno!


Is it possible that when I load an mdl with MCX which contains spot lights, that all spot light parameters are available again? Because so far if I load such an mdl I see it only as an attached effect.
2nd question: If I place multiple spot light to a single mdl, is is possible to merge these effect into a single fx file?

Thanks a lot!
 
Hi,

Yes, you need to set the "replace effects by lights" option to true in the importer settings.

Each FX file defines on type of lights, I don't think you can merge different types in one file. So if you use the same light type you will get one effect. Else you will get multiple.
 
Thanks Arno for your reply.

Basically I want to outfit a huge pylon with 4 lights (or 3). Each light has a different orientation, but the lights other paramaters (position, intensity, cone angle etc) are the same, but for each light a different effect file is created. Is it normal?

Other question: If I want to place the 4 lights to the same position but to distribute them around the 360 degrees (each corner should be lid by a light), with a 45 degrees facing down angle. To achieve this, why do I have to mix pitch and roll? I show you how I could manage it in MCX:

Heading, pitch, roll:
(0.00; 0.00; -45.00)
(-90.00; 45.00; 0.00)
(-180.00; 0.00; 45.00)
(90.00; -45.00; 0.00)

Maybe it is not a bug but my misunderstanding of the orientation angles. To be honest the best would be if the orientation manipulation would work exactly the same way as in 3DSMax XYZ axis. In each cases I construct the lights in 3DS Max and it would be nice to simply copy the rotation settings.
 
Hi,

No, if only the position or orientation is different and all other parameters are the same you should only get one FX file.

I see what you mean with the confusing orientations. Not sure why that happens actually. Maybe it would be more logical to just give the orientation along the xyz axis and don't bother which one is heading, pitch or roll.
 
arno said:
Hi,

Yes, you need to set the "replace effects by lights" option to true in the importer settings.

Each FX file defines on type of lights, I don't think you can merge different types in one file. So if you use the same light type you will get one effect. Else you will get multiple.
Click to expand...

Arno I do this but it will not display the spot light when I load the model into MCX.
 
If you look in the Attached Object Editor do you see the spot light there?
 
Hi,

Actually yesterday I started working on the feature request to also show the spot lights directly from the FX file. That was largely implemented already, I only had a fix a few bugs. That will be in the next development release and might also help with your issue.
 
arno said:
If you look in the Attached Object Editor do you see the spot light there?
Click to expand...

Yes sir, it is there as an attached object. I can see the basic positional attributes for it, but not the effect parameters as when you initially create it.
 
arno said:
Hi,

Actually yesterday I started working on the feature request to also show the spot lights directly from the FX file. That was largely implemented already, I only had a fix a few bugs. That will be in the next development release and might also help with your issue.
Click to expand...

Ok, I had seen this thread and thought it was already implemented. I will try it again after implementation. Thanks!
 
pinkjr said:
Yes sir, it is there as an attached object. I can see the basic positional attributes for it, but not the effect parameters as when you initially create it.
Click to expand...

If you just see the effect, but not a spot light with all attributes, then the effect name probably does not match the MCX naming convention. That is required to be able to convert back from effect to a spotlight.

But with the changes I made today (and will be in the next development release), the spot should be rendered any way.
 
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