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Gmax Multi-Material FSX problem

mutluckaya

mutluckaya

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32
Country
turkey
Hi.
I was familiar with creating and texturing models for FS9, but now finally I began to try on FSX. I have great difficulty in working with multi-materials. Do I have to use only one material when texturing an object?
I am just texturing a simple house just for testing, with random textures. I tried to texture sides of the house with one sub-material, and the roof with other sub-material. The roof (brick) texture does not show in FSX (black). The textures are mip-mapped and converted DXT1, bmp format. I tried dds, no chance...

Here are my caps:




 
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I don't know but most common of my mistake is the file name is not correct. Sometimes I missed spell the name by only one letter, the texture does not show. Or it is miss-placed to other folder.
 
No, that's not the case. This is something about FSX which is different from FS9, because same thing was not making problem in FS9.
 
Sounds like the issue is probably to do with your textures.

There is no issue with using multimaterials in gMax or 3dsMax for FSX. Many of us have been doing this for years.

There is a difficulty in making native FSX materials in a sub-material slots, but this is solved by making FltSimX materials and dragging them onto the submaterial slots. You seem to have overcome this.

The FSX gmax gamepack (I see you are using this) will even convert Standard materials to the correct FSX material.

As a troubleshooting step, open your mdl in ModelconverterX and check in the material list that the materials have exported as you expected, and that they are applied to the correct faces.

If they have correctly exported then the problem lies elsewhere.
 
Thank you, thank you, thank you. Hundreds of thanks. You solved the problem, hcornea. Yes there was a problem in ModelConverterX, the roof texture did not load, squares in black and white, you know. In error log it said that it could not load the texture ROOF???NG.DDS, AND ROOF???NG_LM.DDS :)

I felt very stupid, because at that moment I realized the problem is about a character problem, the "roofing" was typed with a Turkish keyboard, I still do not understand that it recognizes in Gmax but does not recognize in FSX SDK, I think. The "i" in "roofing" is not the "i" you suppose, it is another character on the keyboard, there are also some other characters which may make problem like ç,ü,ğ,ö,ı,ş which I should never use again. When I changed the damned "roofing" which made me crazy for a week to "roof", problem solved :D.

I love this forum.
 
Always make simple names and use DXT 5. DXT 1 is the lowest quality and 5 the highest. When ever you see black, this means you have a material assigned to this part but the game can't find the texture, usually named wrong.
 
delivery guy said:
Always make simple names and use DXT 5. DXT 1 is the lowest quality and 5 the highest. When ever you see black, this means you have a material assigned to this part but the game can't find the texture, usually named wrong.
Click to expand...
As far as I am aware there is no difference in quality of RGB colour information between DXT1 and DXT5. The difference is the multi-bit alpha channel.

Happy to be shown otherwise though.
 
Found this today! I would always use DXT5. AI use DXT3. But to use DXT1 would be compressed the most. So I have to agree on the quality but the performance will be better!

"Quote from Bill leaming"
Although the compression for DXT3 and DXT5 are identical, DXT5 has a better algorithim and therefore less artifacting when uncompressed.
 
The quote refers to the alpha channel, which does produce less gradation artefact.

The RGB information is, unless I am mistaken, encoded the same way.

DXT3 is only used as a legacy (FS9 xBMP files are DXT3 compressed) and earlier DirectX versions loaded DXT3 faster than DXT5. Since Vista this has not been the case.

If your texture does not require alpha, DXT1 offers same RGB and better performance.
 
Thank you all for your valuable comments. But now I have another problem. In FS9 times, I used to create and use materials including tranparent textures using alfa. Now I try to do one for FSX, I am unsuccessful. I tried to create a fence, more correctly, a fence-gate, I used the old alfa-including texture on front and back polygons of a very thin box, the view in FSX is not transparent in between the chains (but black). I tried many things but no way :(. I saved it DXT1 BMP, DXT3 BMP, DXT5 BMP formats, afterwards DXT1 DDS, DXT3 DDS, DXT5 DDS. All of them same result.

Is there another trick ? Or a change in FSX SDK?

For the alfa channel, full black > full transparent and full white > full opaque RIGHT?

Afterwards I used the alfa-including chain fence texture of FSX ChainFence512.dds (which is inside the FSX texture folder) to create my material - as the diffuse color - and nothing more. And sure located the DXT5 DDS texture under my scenery's texture folder.

Again and again no transparency !

May there be a check or something under the FSX Material Parameters ?
 
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FSX does not control transparency with the texture only.
You need to set up the material to be transparent too.
1. Use default transparency button in the material setting.
2. Alpha test level to about 128 ( in the middle of slider). You can tone it down if you want semitransparent.
3. Z alpha write check box in the last item of the texture property.
 
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jtanabodee said:
FSX does not control transparency with the texture only.
You need to set up the material to be transparency too.
1. Use default transparency button in the material setting.
2. Alpha test level to about 128 ( in the middle of slider). You can tone it down if you want semitransparent.
3. Z alpha write check box in the last item of the texture property.
Click to expand...

Clicking on "Use default transparent" button solved the problem, thank you all. But next time I will not forget your recommendations.
 
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