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Rendering Preview in ModelconverterX

hcornea

hcornea

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australia
Hi Arno,

More and more I find ModelconverterX useful for previewing models outside of FSX.

I have no idea how difficult or otherwise the following might be:

Currently the Alpha layer is previewed as transparent (regardless of material settings) .. eg sometimes it is used to modulate a reflection map. It would be great if it was rendered according to settings

Detail maps (and associated slider) are currently not previewed .. I often use these, and it would be very handy to assess the amount / extent of tiling as specified in the material settings slider. Also, these are prone to artefact due to mapping, which would be great to pick up (without starting FSX)

Same for bump maps (although not absolutely necessary)

Spec mapping? or is that stretching it too far?!

Many thanks for your ongoing work on this.
 
Hi,

hcornea said:
Currently the Alpha layer is previewed as transparent (regardless of material settings) .. eg sometimes it is used to modulate a reflection map. It would be great if it was rendered according to settings
Click to expand...

Let me check, the preview is supposed to use the material settings. But I have also seen that with some textures that does not seem to work correctly indeed.

Do you see this behaviour with all models? With the FSX MDL reader I would expect it should work. Some other readers will automatically set a material to transparent when they find an alpha channel in the texture. But the FSX reader just reads the material information from the file.

hcornea said:
Detail maps (and associated slider) are currently not previewed .. I often use these, and it would be very handy to assess the amount / extent of tiling as specified in the material settings slider. Also, these are prone to artefact due to mapping, which would be great to pick up (without starting FSX)
Click to expand...

This is on my wishlist already, but I would have to figure out how easy it is to code a detail map in OpenGL. If that is not too much work, it should be relatively easy to add.

hcornea said:
Same for bump maps (although not absolutely necessary)
Click to expand...

Some comments as for the detail map. Also, it seems FS uses some special form of bump map (with some of the channels different from normally used in bump maps). I would have to check if that gives any compilations.

hcornea said:
Spec mapping? or is that stretching it too far?!
Click to expand...

I guess those would be much harder to add, but in the end it would be cool if that was possible as well :).
 
Hi Arno,

That all sounds good.

I'm only importing FSX models (mine), and the most typical problem is opaque materials that have a black or mid-grey to modulate the environment map (reflection)
 
OK, it's on my todo list. I will do some research on how to code these features and then hopefully I can implement it soon.
 
Arno ... another few little things

With the night view rendered the preview does not render properly .. I believethis is because it is using the alpha from the lm textures (rather than the alpha from the diffuse textures) as FSX does.
 
Hi,

Yes, currently ModelConverterX uses the alpha from the night texture. That is indeed not what FS does, let me put that on the todo list.
 
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