At 12/18/02, Jim Wilson wrote:
Michael Selig <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> said:Panels -- From what I can gather, Chuck Dome is a real pro at making MSFS panels. If those can be converted to FGFS, then we would have a slew of panels to pick from because if asked I am pretty sure he would GPL them like he has w/ the models.
> Chuck Dome has OK'ed our use of his models w/ FlightGear. Here's a list of
> his ~70+ aircraft that he has GPL'd:
> http://www.fs2000.org/dome/index.htm
>
> This list grows w/ updates coming from:
> http://home.cfl.rr.com/cdfss/
>
This is great! But we need panel work big time. It'd be nice to get more
complete panels.
Many of his panels are here: http://www.fs2000.org/dome/index.htm
> Unfortunately, these newer MSFS models (FS2000/2002) are not FlightGearThank you for this explanation. It reminds me now of some past comments from you along these lines.
> friendly for reasons that I do not understand. The error deals w/ the
> textures (perhaps being too large?). If I delete the textures, the model
> will load, but it runs really slow (the .mdl file is ~1MB).
Seems to me that the organization of the files is quite different and perhaps
plib is more suited to the kind of method that ac3d uses (and maybe 3ds). The
ac3d file is grouped into objects that often contain surface elements. For
example, in some of the ac3d models the fuselage is considered a single object
and it contains vertices that define the object, multiple surfaces that
reference particular vertices in the object and a texture mappings for each
surface that reference the same texture. Remember only one texture per "object".
Now when converting from mdl to ac3d using ppe (which _maybe_ isn't the same
thing as just loading the mdl) I've noticed that the output from ppe puts
adjacent surfaces using the same texture into an object. This makes sense
since ac3d objects contain a single texture and mulitple surfaces. Rather
than sorting out the vertices that go with each surface, the exporter puts
every single vertex in the entire model into every single object. But the
created object only contains the surfaces and the corresponding texture
assigned to it.
This creates a huge ac3d file, especially with the more detailed models that
tend to be made for FS2000 and FS2002. I can't say for sure but perhaps the
mdl loader packs all the vertices for the entire model into each ssg node that
refers to an "object". This would explain the slowness. If the model
ends up with two hundered "objects" because of complex texturing, then a 5000
vertice model would become a 1,000,000 vertice model.
I was hoping for the answer "use this code to convert the files", but things are not so simple unfortunately.
Regards,
Michael
**************************************************
Prof. Michael S. Selig
Dept. of Aero/Astro Engineering
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
306 Talbot Laboratory
104 South Wright Street
Urbana, IL 61801-2935
(217) 244-5757 (o), (509) 691-1373 (fax)
mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
http://www.uiuc.edu/ph/www/m-selig
http://www.uiuc.edu/ph/www/m-selig/faq.html (FAQ)
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