• Which the release of FS2020 we see an explosition of activity on the forun and of course we are very happy to see this. But having all questions about FS2020 in one forum becomes a bit messy. So therefore we would like to ask you all to use the following guidelines when posting your questions:

    • Tag FS2020 specific questions with the MSFS2020 tag.
    • Questions about making 3D assets can be posted in the 3D asset design forum. Either post them in the subforum of the modelling tool you use or in the general forum if they are general.
    • Questions about aircraft design can be posted in the Aircraft design forum
    • Questions about airport design can be posted in the FS2020 airport design forum. Once airport development tools have been updated for FS2020 you can post tool speciifc questions in the subforums of those tools as well of course.
    • Questions about terrain design can be posted in the FS2020 terrain design forum.
    • Questions about SimConnect can be posted in the SimConnect forum.

    Any other question that is not specific to an aspect of development or tool can be posted in the General chat forum.

    By following these guidelines we make sure that the forums remain easy to read for everybody and also that the right people can find your post to answer it.

Texture Problem

biggard

biggard

Messages
180
Country
us-california
Hey guys,

I finished a terminal in gmax and decided to have a window to show the inside. I went with an alpha layer but that has developed a new problem. You can now see through the terminal and the objects on the inside are all invisible...When you slew the aircraft over to the inside, past the alpha layered texture, everything is visible including the walls on the other side of the terminal (what I wanted)...What is going wrong and how should I fix it?

David Biggar
david.biggar@gmail.com
 
biggard said:
Hey guys,

I finished a terminal in gmax and decided to have a window to show the inside. I went with an alpha layer but that has developed a new problem. You can now see through the terminal and the objects on the inside are all invisible...When you slew the aircraft over to the inside, past the alpha layered texture, everything is visible including the walls on the other side of the terminal (what I wanted)...What is going wrong and how should I fix it?

David Biggar
david.biggar@gmail.com
Click to expand...

Hi,

In order to see the inside of a building I use a boolean operation. Cut out the window and then remove the inside of the building with a boolean too. Beware to not remove a poly before the boolean thing because you will encounter the same problem.

Afterwards you can put a semi transparent glass object in the window to make it more realistic.

Hope this helps.

José.
 
The person advising you has shown you a way to produce polygons on the inside "walls" of your building. Gmax produces only polygons on the outside, polygons face only one direction. You certainly could use boolean operations to do this.

A different approach (one that I prefer) is to clone the building. Edit/clone. Now select the clone, enter polygon submode, and click on "flip normals".

presto, polygons on the inside of the walls.

I would also mention that shapemerge works great to cut windows in walls, check it out.

As far as how do I boolean, how do I shapemerge...stuff like that there are tutorials for all of that. I'd suggest you google gmax or 3dsmax tutorials. perhaps someone will lead you thru all of that here, I don't have the energy at present...but its all out there for your reading, you just have to look around.

Good luck!

Bob
 
biggard said:
How would I do this, and where does gmax have a boolean?
Click to expand...

Hi,

When you have made you building, you make a box with the size of your window and long enough because you have to pull this box into your building for the boolean operation.

You select the building and change in the rollout menu from Standard Primitives to Compound objects. Then you see the Boolean toggle. Click on it and look at the operation possibilities.
Introduce your box into your building and click on Pick Operand B.
If your building disappears, then click on Undo and change in Operation (in the Boolean menu) B into A for example.
Use the Undo if necessary for easy working.
Normally you will see disappearing the box and a window is made.

The same operation for deleting the inside of your building. Make second building a little bit smaler than the building you are working on (for the thickness of the walls) and place it using the different views to position it in a perfect way.

You can read it all over in the Help files of GMAX.
Do first a test.

Greetz. José.
 
Well I want to try the flip idea, but my building is made of many parts, should I just flip each individual building?
 
Hi,

I think it's a lot of work to change your terminal to flip everything or to apply a boolean. A faster way will be tweaking the asm source code manually. The problem causing the inside of the terminal not showing is drawing order.
Currently the inside is drawn before the outside. That means that the outside (of your windows) is drawn after the inside. That's why the inside is not showing when you look through the windows.

You will have to export your terminal from Gmax and keep the asm files (it's an option during export). Then open the asm files and look for the polygons that define the inside of your object. This is not very simple I know, but look at the material assignments and maybe you can find the inside like that. Then these parts of code should be executed before the rest of the code, simply by moving them above the other parts of code (but below the VERTEX_DEF part). Correct me if I'm wrong... I think there are some other posts on this forum about drawing order, so you can have a look at them as well.

Good luck,
Thomas
 
Thomas, I may have missed something...but I didn't see any indication that this designer has doublesided normals on his "walls"...you say drawing order is at fault but that isn't the case if its my guess..that he just hasn't told gmax to display polygons facing inward.

As far as having many seperate boxes....use attach or attach from list to have gmax see these as just one object. then the clone, and flip normals should work on your entire structure.

Bob
 
I think there is at least something inside the terminal that he cannot see from the outside:

...the objects on the inside are all invisible...When you slew the aircraft over to the inside, past the alpha layered texture, everything is visible including the walls on the other side of the terminal (what I wanted)...
Click to expand...

Anyway, maybe the designer can post one or more screenshots over here, so we can clearly see what the exact problem is...

Grtz,
Thomas
 
I got the asm and got lost since its so big...what do I change, and how do I determine what is what? Also wont a change in the draw order draw my insides over the window even though they are behind it?

I'm also trying the flipping (trial and error), but after I attach them, I dont know where to find any of the options...also what attach should I do (since I have 3 options)?
 
Last edited:
Hi,

No, the inside must be drawn first (so before the windows), else they are not shown as you see now. Do you have a different texture on the inside and the outside? In that case just making sure that the name of the outside texture is after the inside one (alphabetically) should allow you to control the drawing order as well. This might be an easier solution then tweaking the ASM code, although that also works of course :).
 
Arno, again you saved me, I renamed the window texture to start with a z, and presto, the terminal looks like it is supposed too. Thanks to everyone who gave me help.

David Biggar
david.biggar@gmail.com
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top