Alphasim B-24J Lowest LOD Model Fix

Pen32Win

Charter Member
I've been updating a ton of stuff this weekend and one of the upgrades was to my B-24's. In the PTO I had only used the Alphasim B-24D, not the "J". While testing the "J" I had applied SC's "Male Call" (Jimmy Stewarts bird) skin to the "J" model which is Olive Green. I noticed that as I pulled away from the AI formation of B-24's that they turned Lt. Grey when they hit the lowest LOD Model. At first I thought it was a texture issue, not so. The lowest LOD Model is untextured. It only carries the color of the part in the MDL. So the search was on, and I found it! Here's how to fix it....

If you open the MDL with MW's MDLMat.exe and find "00006292" and change it to the color you want (I used RGB 90,89,66 taken from SC's Male Call Skin) the lowest LOD is now the same color as your skin. Note, this material is also used for the Highest LOD Landing Gear Struts. So if you can handle OD struts instead of Lt. Grey it's the fix.

I don't know if this has been covered before but as most know I was away for awhile. So if this is old news please excuse the redundancy.
 
Not redundent at all as far as I know, but then I was only in and out for quite a while the last couple of years and might have missed it too.
 
Reply...

Pen32Win,

I don't believe that this has been caught before, great work! :wiggle:
 
Actually, it is a good idea not to texture the smallest of the LOD models.
And the original Alphasim B-24J was silver / light grey.

So now you need to have two models. But anyway, I do this for most of my US aircraft, who come in OD and bare metal. I tone the first one down and polish the second model up - for all LOD models.

BTW: I also noticed, that the basic material should be coloured close to the final textured colour.

If unsure, use a mid-tone dirty grey. When the sim loads the model (or object), I sometimes saw the untexured white model, before all textures were loaded and put on the model. In the colourful virtual reality of CFS2, this resulted in a shortly visible white spot. It is not to notice with a coloured model.


BTW II: I have also downloaded a FS9 ALPHAsim B-24 set, but I am not able to convert it. Is there anyone, who was smarter than me and managed to do it?
 
"So now you need to have two models. "

That's exactly what I did. You see "Male-Call" was a B-24H, so the Green MDL I created became the "H" Model and the Silver one is in the "J" Model...
 
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