MCX Question

[Duckie]

Is it possible to change the material color in a model using MCX? This change would be for personal use only. I'm just tired of flying around with fuselage signal lights that are colored bright lime green, florescent yellow, and florescent red! They really detract from an otherwise descent looking model.

The colors for the lights are in the model and show up in MCX. I've identified the colors and can change them but the model exports with errors.

Thanks in advance for your help,

Steve

[falcon409]

I wish that was possible however I think the only option is "MDLMat", which. . .if you can locate the correct material, allows you to change the color and save it back to the mdl file. I've tried it in the past, but it's like looking for a needle in a haystack. There may be as many as 20 or more material colors for the exterior and you have to find the one that you're looking for. If it's a very uncommon color then you may be lucky enough to discover there's only one material in that whole lot that happens to have that color, but that's not always the case.

Changing it in MCX would be so much easier because MCX pinpoints the exact color for the exact position it occupies, but then you have to save back to the mdl file and if there were any errors when loading it (they show up as MCX is reading the mdl), then those errors (as you've discovered) are saved back to the mdl and your airplane is toast.

[Duckie]

Thanks Ed. I kinda thought that might be the case.

Steve

[Duckie]

UPDATE:

Ed I went back and looked at it in MDLMat and it only had 34 colors and of those there were only 2 reds, 2 greens, and 1 "yellow".

So now my signal lites are not nearly as noticeable as they were before. Thanks for the reminder about MDLMat. I hadn't used it since my FS9 days and I had never even unzipped the FSX version!

Thanks again,
Steve

[falcon409]

UPDATE:

Ed I went back and looked at it in MDLMat and it only had 34 colors and of those there were only 2 reds, 2 greens, and 1 "yellow".
So now my signal lites are not nearly as noticeable as they were before. Thanks for the reminder about MDLMat. I hadn't used it since my FS9 days and I had never even unzipped the FSX version!

Thanks again,
Steve

Excellent! Glad it worked for you Steve!

[DaveQ]

Two things. First, are these nav lights? if so you can swap them for better ones. I tend to use the Milviz ones when I make lighting changes. Second, if the lights have visibility conditions, making changes with the visibility conditions in place can screw up the model badly. You could try setting the visibility conditions to 'none', make the changes, save and exit MCX. Open up again, make the visibility condition changes and save. It's a trick Henk (hschuit) taught me a few months ago; for years I'd get corrupted models if I tried making too many changes to models, especially where weapons with loadout visibility conditions were involved. MCX seems to hate changes being made to parts with visibility conditions active. Worth a try - no guarantees!

[Duckie]

Two things. First, are these nav lights? if so you can swap them for better ones. I tend to use the Milviz ones when I make lighting changes. Second, if the lights have visibility conditions, making changes with the visibility conditions in place can screw up the model badly. You could try setting the visibility conditions to 'none', make the changes, save and exit MCX. Open up again, make the visibility condition changes and save. It's a trick Henk (hschuit) taught me a few months ago; for years I'd get corrupted models if I tried making too many changes to models, especially where weapons with loadout visibility conditions were involved. MCX seems to hate changes being made to parts with visibility conditions active. Worth a try - no guarantees!

Hi Dave. Thanks for the tip. It was just a diffuse color change only, the static ingame daylight (lights off) display and I used MDLMatXX to make the changes. They are the landing signal lights, bottom aft fuselage. The stock colors were so bright, very distracting, and you definitely wouldn't take a screen shot with those lights showing. I almost decided to uninstall it but gave it one more try. There doesn't seem to be any negative effects of the change that I've seen so far.

[fsafranek]

This seems interesting and I'd like to try it on the visors of the Flight1 Islander. Can someone please post a like to the MDLMat utility.
I've scoured Martin Wright's website (that it is Martin is an assumption on my part) but cannot find a working link to download.
Thanks in advance.

[UncleTgt]

http://www.mwgfx.co.uk/beta.htm

Click on the yellow disk (in the column marked D/L)

[fsafranek]

http://www.mwgfx.co.uk/beta.htm

Click on the yellow disk (in the column marked D/L)

Thanks. I scanned that page that page this morning but must have scanned right over it.

[Shessi]

FS,
You need the MDLMatXX (about halfway down that list) not just the MDLMat prog, for FSX work.

Cheers

Shessi

[fsafranek]

FS,
You need the MDLMatXX (about halfway down that list) not just the MDLMat prog, for FSX work.

Cheers

Shessi

Yep, spotted that. Thanks.

Turns out the visor color in the Islander is a texture so that's an easy fix.
But hadn't heard of Martin's MDLMat utility so I'm glad this thread was started.