FS9 'AutoWeld' in Gmax Compiler
- Thread starter Lionheart
- Start date
Actually, the weld happens in the compiler, not gmax. I thought you were aware of the switch available in Makemdl, or more easily in mdlcommander.
michael davies
Charter Member 2012
Bill,
The weld is in MakeMDL, not Gmax I'm afraid, with it ticked off its about 3mm, with it ticked on its about 5mm.
Theres two ways around it, I found it really only effects VCs so I doubled the size of the mesh and then compiled it and left it like that, that gave a weld of 1.5mm, now the purist might scoff at a double size VC but no one noticed the few I did for a payware vendor last year, what the eye don't see....
. The double size VC also helped with spacial orientation and zoom levels and seemed much closer to average eye focal lengths, I always felt like some dwarf with Gollum sized eyes in the default zoom and VC sized cockpits LOL. The 1.5mm weld easily offset the scale issue IMHO.
200% VCs might not work so well for larger aircraft but for fighters and GA it seemed to work exceptionally well, as I say the visual impact was great, certainly led me to feel more immersed in the VC, rather than being shoe horned into it.
The other way is to build in 16x or 8x and compile, then you need a freeware program that rescales the finished *.mdl file, cant recall what its called these days, that gets around the MakeMDL 3mm weld issue, at 8x its about 0.3mm weld and at 16x its 0.18mm, plenty good enough for most modellers I think ?. The only downside is that the models sometimes look too small in the preview window, I think thats something to do with crash bubbles, it used to be an issue with CFS2 and there was a tool to adjust crash bubbles and thus aircraft preview sizes. FS9 is based in part on the old CFS2 engine so that tool might work for FS9 as well ?, don't know, never needed to use it, but small preview models is a small price to pay for exceptional vertex weld IMHO.
So the 3mm weld issue really isn't an issue, now bust the 70,000 poly limit and then your getting somewhere, sadly I never got above 73,000 with MakeMDL, some say you can flip out the x file and then merge them later to make a mdl file, never tried it but editing text files and also sorts of other stuff just seemed to be harder than FSx so I opted for the latter.
Hope that helps
Best
Michael
The weld is in MakeMDL, not Gmax I'm afraid, with it ticked off its about 3mm, with it ticked on its about 5mm.
Theres two ways around it, I found it really only effects VCs so I doubled the size of the mesh and then compiled it and left it like that, that gave a weld of 1.5mm, now the purist might scoff at a double size VC but no one noticed the few I did for a payware vendor last year, what the eye don't see....
. The double size VC also helped with spacial orientation and zoom levels and seemed much closer to average eye focal lengths, I always felt like some dwarf with Gollum sized eyes in the default zoom and VC sized cockpits LOL. The 1.5mm weld easily offset the scale issue IMHO. 200% VCs might not work so well for larger aircraft but for fighters and GA it seemed to work exceptionally well, as I say the visual impact was great, certainly led me to feel more immersed in the VC, rather than being shoe horned into it.
The other way is to build in 16x or 8x and compile, then you need a freeware program that rescales the finished *.mdl file, cant recall what its called these days, that gets around the MakeMDL 3mm weld issue, at 8x its about 0.3mm weld and at 16x its 0.18mm, plenty good enough for most modellers I think ?. The only downside is that the models sometimes look too small in the preview window, I think thats something to do with crash bubbles, it used to be an issue with CFS2 and there was a tool to adjust crash bubbles and thus aircraft preview sizes. FS9 is based in part on the old CFS2 engine so that tool might work for FS9 as well ?, don't know, never needed to use it, but small preview models is a small price to pay for exceptional vertex weld IMHO.
So the 3mm weld issue really isn't an issue, now bust the 70,000 poly limit and then your getting somewhere, sadly I never got above 73,000 with MakeMDL, some say you can flip out the x file and then merge them later to make a mdl file, never tried it but editing text files and also sorts of other stuff just seemed to be harder than FSx so I opted for the latter
.Hope that helps
Best
Michael