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Scenery not visible past tweaking with CAT

CitMusJoe

CitMusJoe

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60
Country
austria
Hello,

I have created a single door with FS2004 gamepack in Gmax. I also added an animation to that door. It consitsts of two parts, tick18_Door01 and tick18_DoorGlass. I linked the tick18_DoorGlass to tick18_Door01, so the tick18_Door01 is the parent part. I set 2 KFs, one at 0 and the other rotation KF at 100. I set FPS in Gmax to 20 frames, which is the nearest settable value. I reduced to this simplicity to exclude other enventual errors. Every part has been given a material. I exported the file as scenrey.mdl and viewed the log file past mdl creation. In the log file I can't see any error.

Next I started CAT (1.02) and set 'Enable animation trigger' to *enable*, option button to Condition (between). In the same CAT-window I next set the variable selection drop down list to 'NAV2 frequency' and pushed the button [ < ] to transfer the corresponding variable value into the blank field, which showed then: "07C2h". In the last two fields (Min/Max value) I entered "1000h" into each field to set the dependency frequency to NAV2, frequency 110.00. Then I pushed two times [Next] button and selected the .asm file for the input file. And so on ...
No errors in the 'message window of CAT' and finally the message: parse completed.

Next I used LibraryCreatorXML to get the final bgl file.

Each time I reworked the original Gmax exported scenery.mdl with CAT I can't see anything in FSX.

I already checked the country settings inside Windows to have the 'dot' as decimal delimitter. The texture files also reside in the correct folder (otherwise the scenery wouldn't show up without CAT tweaking.

Has anyone else suggestions what I could check, or what I'm doing wrong?
 
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Hi,

Sounds you follow the right approach. Does your object have transparent materials (texture with alpha channel is not a problem). These can result in misplaced parts.
 
arno said:
Hi,

Sounds you follow the right approach. Does your object have transparent materials (texture with alpha channel is not a problem). These can result in misplaced parts.
Click to expand...

Indeed one part, the glass portion of the door, has applied a transparent material without map. My intention was to have it both transparent, in Gmax and in FS, what is true when not tweaking the mdl with CAT.
AFAICR I saw black windows glass in Gmax when not doing it this way.

I'll try to get both correct, and let you know about.

In the meanwhile thanks for your advice Arno!
 
So here are the results.

1) I applied a material _and_ a map with alpha channel onto the glass-window-part (tick18_DoorGlass). I also enabled in Gmax's material rollout the Opacity and changed the default value. In Gmax all ok, but when exporting as scenery.mdl Gmax says this combination isn't possible. Trying without using the opacity ends up with black colored window-glass in Gmax.

2) So I simply eliminated the part (tick18_DoorGlass). The new door just has a small whole in it which isn't that big problem IMHO. When tweaked with CAT I noticed, the door is now lying on the ground and rotated by 90 degrees. The final solution was: adding a t least one additional non-animated part in the Gmax file. In my case it was the doorframe. And voila' all worked well. :)

3) Some months ago I did similar with the FSX gamepack, there I could see all in Gmax and FSX correct without removing the semi-transparent parts.

4) Finally I tried to put the door animation file and the rest of my static scenery objects into one file using FS2004 gamepack. No errors past exporting the mdl from Gmax and no errors when tweaking with CAT, but
FS all the times crashed when trying to load that scenery. It seems there is a limitation for the amount of processable vertices/polygons/filesize or something else? I don't know. But this is a thing I really can good live with it. I simply have to place 2 files instead of one from the library.

So many thanks again Arno for your 'kick' to success! ;)
 
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