Developers; High Poly FSX Models into FS9; Tutorial

[Lionheart]

Hey all,

I remember hearing a couple of Developers saying that one of the main reasons they went to FSX was because of the 65K Polygon Limit and the 4MM Auto Weld issue on small parts.

Well, we got through this. I have just created the 2nd Edition Tutorial on how this is done for people working in Gmax. This is also good for developers that would love to have their FSX planes in FS9 also without simplifying the model. Its now possible.


INFO here; http://www.sim-outhouse.com/sohforums/showthread.php?t=41622&p=467099#post467099




A tutorial will be coming out for FSDS Developers on this subject also, soon.



Bill

[anthony31]

Thanks for this tutorial Bill, it looks fantastic by the way.

I was reading through this tutorial and it got me thinking.

One of the problems with FSDS is that you when you export a FSX model it will round off the vertices to the nearest 0.9765mm (0.9765 = 1/1024th of a metre). I know Louis Sinclair is working on a 3.5.2 version which should overcome this problem but I haven't been able to get a copy of it.

So... originally I was thinking I should make my models 100 times larger in FSDS (which would also make working on them a lot easier as you can avoid the poor zooming control of FSDS) and then I could use Arno's ModelConverterX to scale the model back down to normal size but MCX doesn't handle aircraft animations that well.

Then, after reading your tutorial I thought I would mess about with the Masterscale parameters in the .x file. After a bit of trial and error I changed these lines:

FrameTransformMatrix {
1.0, 0.0, 0.0, 0.0,
0.0, 0.0, 1.0, 0.0,
0.0, -1.0, 0.0, 0.0,
0.0, 0.0, 0.0, 1.0;;
}

to this:

FrameTransformMatrix {
0.01, 0.0, 0.0, 0.0,
0.0, 0.0, 0.01, 0.0,
0.0, -0.01, 0.0, 0.0,
0.0, 0.0, 0.0, 1.0;;
}

Notice I changed the first three 1.0 values to 0.01 and doing so made the model 1/100th the size when I ran it through xtomdl.

Still very early stages in this as all I used was a 32 sided tube 1meter in diameter with some simple ambient animations to test the concept. But, after loading the test model into MCX to see what it looked like ( a perfectly round tube 1cm in diameter which is impossible to achieve in FSDS normally) I'm thinking I might be onto something here which could be very helpful to me in the near future.

I still haven't loaded the model into FSX so plenty more testing needed to see how it works on a full model.

Of course, I'm sure someone probably already knows this but it's new to me.

Thanks Bill

[Lionheart]

Hey Anthony,


I do not know how the FSDS system is scaled, but they talk about it here;

http://www.fsdeveloper.com/forum/showthread.php?t=20064


Seems Gmax and FSDS have different forms of X files.

Good luck on your project.


Bill