MDLmat tutorial tweak by Norab

O

OBIO

Retired SOH Admin
A few days ago, I uploaded a tutorial I wrote up on using Martin Wright's MDLmat to adjust the color, transparency and specular shine of MDL defined materials. Yesterday evening I got a PM from norab sating that he had taken my jpg based tutorial and created a pdf file out of it....made it much easier to scroll through the tutorial and reduced the size as well. I gave him permission to upload it to the library...and he did...it can be found in the FS2004 Other section of the library. He sent me a copy of it...much easier to read through the tutorial in PDF format.

Good thinking norab! Wish I had thought of creating it as a pdf....good to know that there are some intelligent folks left in this world.

OBIO
 
That's great - and it works!
http://www.sim-outhouse.com/sohforums/showthread.php?t=37854&p=428768&viewfull=1#post428768

Thank you so much!

But how do I figure out which material (and for the P-40 model, it's 40 lines of it, LOD1 and LOD2 together) belongs to which part of the model?

What I actually did is to set each of the materials whose specular value was not 0/0/0 before to this value. Must have been 6 or 7 of it.

If I wanted some parts still a little specular, do I have to process a long try&error session to find out which part is assigned to which material?

Cheers,
Markus.
 
Markus

Trial and error, trial and error. What I find that helps to some degree is to create an empty texture folder and name it Texture.mdl or something like that. Tweak the config file to use this empty texture folder, then fire up the sim or ACM and see what color is used for the various parts. I have found that gray and white are the most common colors used for external materials. If you know that the plane is modeled in light gray, then anything that is black, blue, green, yellow, etc you know is not part of the external model.

As far as assigning one level of specular shine to one part and another level of shine to other parts...sometimes that can be done if various material definitions are used for the various parts...but in most cases, one material definition is used for the entire external of the model...so you can only set one specular shine level for the entire plane.

Oh, and having a material list 40 lines long is a short one...I have worked on models with over 300 material listings.

Tim
 
I test the materials by changing them (temporarily) to bright pink, funny how it's not a common colour used by modellers, stands out well against the blacks, greys and whites, lol.

Jamie
 
OBIO said:
Markus

Trial and error, trial and error. What I find that helps to some degree is to create an empty texture folder and name it Texture.mdl or something like that. Tweak the config file to use this empty texture folder, then fire up the sim or ACM and see what color is used for the various parts. I have found that gray and white are the most common colors used for external materials. If you know that the plane is modeled in light gray, then anything that is black, blue, green, yellow, etc you know is not part of the external model.

As far as assigning one level of specular shine to one part and another level of shine to other parts...sometimes that can be done if various material definitions are used for the various parts...but in most cases, one material definition is used for the entire external of the model...so you can only set one specular shine level for the entire plane.

Oh, and having a material list 40 lines long is a short one...I have worked on models with over 300 material listings.

Tim
Click to expand...

That's fine to know, now if we could find out which of those 40 P-40 files contains the antenna and change its color appropriately, then we might be testing the gods of Flight Sim. :icon_lol:

A good tut OBIO, .jpg or .pfd, Thanks to you and norab. :ernae:

Caz, pretty day, went to boot camp, hiked 7 miles, need a bath.
 
JDTinballs said:
I test the materials by changing them (temporarily) to bright pink,
Click to expand...

With a RGB of 255/0/255?
That's funny - it's exactly the colour I use to trace parts of a repaint I don't know where they are mapped to. My usual check mark coulour...

OBIO, the blank texture folder is a splendid idea! Have to give it a try.

As long as only parts of the exterior model are concerned to be tweaked, can I basically ignore the LOD2 materials? Are these only used for the interior (VC)?

Cheers,
Markus.
 
Yup, surprising how handy it is, can be a tweakers best friend & favourite colour (don't tell folks, they'll maybe start talkin', lol)

LOD2 is usually the VC, IF the model is a single LOD exterior, if it has more than one external LOD, CFS2 or AI plane perhaps (even the default FS9), then the VC will be the last LOD usually. The others are for the different exterior models, this can be apest, but often they follow a similar pattern to the main LOD, some materials dissappear as the simpler LOD's may not require them, ie glass, etc.

hope that makes sense,
Jamie
 
So this is to our friend - whatever his gender preferences might be... :d


I'm in the beginning of getting things figured out:
So if I have the IRIS P-40 model with 22 material items on LOD1 and 18 with LOD2, I can rely on the complete LOD2 stuff being VC and concentrate on the LOD1 items to tweak them, right?

Is there any rule or habit on how each item is assigned to a certain part of the aircraft (e.g. line 1 for the fuselage, 2 for the wings, 3 for the tailplane and so on...), or is every model creator free to assign them?
 
Blue Note

How cool is that?

blue.jpg


All the exterior stuff lies in one material line (it's #14!).
Knowing that, it won't be a big thing to tweak all the P-40 variants (E, F, L, N) to non-specular... :jump:

Thank you, guys!
 
Wild Bill Kelso said:
Is there any rule or habit on how each item is assigned to a certain part of the aircraft (e.g. line 1 for the fuselage, 2 for the wings, 3 for the tailplane and so on...), or is every model creator free to assign them?
Click to expand...

No rules, anything goes I'm affraid, but it looks like you figured that out already, lol.

Jamie
 
Wild Bill Kelso said:
How cool is that?

blue.jpg


All the exterior stuff lies in one material line (it's #14!).
Knowing that, it won't be a big thing to tweak all the P-40 variants (E, F, L, N) to non-specular... :jump:

Thank you, guys!
Click to expand...

Markus, I wonder if it could be used to color the antenna? Shooting arrows in the dark I am afraid, but curious.

Caz
 
Caz

Changing the color of the material to give the antenna some color other than white will work...as long as the rest of the parts are texture mapped or you don't mind all the unmapped parts being the same color as the antenna.

Tim
 
Hmmm - we already found out that the antenna isn't texture mapped, right?
So if I'm able to figure out which material defines this naughty whip:
What had to be done to make it dissapear?
Setting its Alpha to "0" (fully transparent)?
 
Yup - that did it!

modtweak1.jpg


The antenna is gone! :wiggle:

But here's the bad news:
The material defining the whip antenna (#1) also does the interior side of the dashboard:

modtweak2.jpg


and the inner side of the ammo holes:

modtweak3.jpg


So cutting off the antenna makes these parts dissappear as well...
Seems like we have to live with the antenna.

What do you think?
 
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