Instant Scenery V2

[DaveB]

George..

Sri for the delay mate. We had visitors turn up on their way to Berkshire, just as I'd finished a quick repaint and was about to place it. Here we go..



It doesn't need close scrutiny but it doesn't need to Once again.. thanks for your help on this

I had a further look at what I thought was the BAe sub building at Devonport and it was the BAe Devonshire building at Barrow Never mind.. it may come in handy one day

I could tart the crane up to look much better but as I said.. there's no real need. I'm quite impressed by this Sketchup lark and would never have thought of looking there. Get rid of those nasty default cranes and add a few of Garry's and that'll be it

ATB
DaveB

[GHD]

Looks great.

(and I got a notification )

[DaveB]

Cheers George

Ben has found we do have or have had a prob with notifications today. He's trying to find the reason why

I had to paint that btw.. the original was so buggered it wouldn't accept block fill. I purposely took little care with it in an attempt to give it a more worn look. Not sure I succeeded but it's not as pristine as it would otherwise have looked

ATB
DaveB

[DaveB]

George.. another one for you I'm afraid. Should we rename this thread 'Ask George'?

Enjoying mooching around the south coast as I have the past few days.. I've turned my attention to Southampton. I'm not sure if it's too close to Portsmouth to cause frame hits yet but with an empty dock area just begging for buildings.. I thought I'd make a start using objects from Sketchup. Here's the first.. Solent Flour Mills..



This wasn't an ideal choice for a first building because of the shear size of it and the amount of textures it calls However.. you only need a few like this to be able to tell exactly where you are so maybe it was a good choice after all Anyway.. my question concerns making scenery areas. What I'd like to make is a less detailed version of Southampton, similar to Portsmouth. There are numerous high-rise buildings available at 3D warehouse which I can use so I've a good source of material.
It would be nice to have a scenery area called Southampton and have all the bits and bobs included in the one file. However, I can't get my head around how I can do this. Library bgls are fine.. I can just keep adding libraries. The problem concerns textures. Sketchup kicks the textures out (as does MCX) with the same numbering/wording convention so while I can have any number of libraries or bgl's in the scenery folder, I can't lob all the textures into the texture folder as every model kicks out the same names/numbers if that makes sense. Is it possible to rename textures and still have the model recognise them so that texture0 for solent mills could be called smills1.dds and texture0 for another model could be called model0 or whatever?

The only alternative I can think of is to add individual bits of scenery as scenery layers in flightsim and I'd soon run out of layers.. well.. I'd have rather more than I need I can't quite get my head around the whole scenery 'thing' yet (as you can see). The majority of models I'd like to throw at Southampton are bespoke and wouldn't go anywhere else.. unless of course you'd like to use a block of flats (for example) in any other number of towns/cities.

ATB
DaveB

[GHD]

In the Materials Editor:



Of course you can also change the model name

[DaveB]

Hi George

That's a very handy little tool I'd completely managed to miss Solent Mills in particular has so many textures, I'd lose the will to live! I pulled QE2 in and physically changed the texture names but although there are only 3, it's a bit of a frame monster. I think the guardrails are the major cause Anyway.. that's another problem solved. Cheers me dears

Solent Mills already achieves it's purpose btw. As soon as you take off from Soton on the southerly runway.. you can see it in the distance. You can probably see QE2 there now though I'm not sure how long its staying

ATB
DaveB

[GHD]

That's the problem with Warehouse models, they are made to show details so are very high poly.

I have Alnwick and Bamburgh Castles which are ok since they are out in the sticks.

[DaveB]

Hiya George..

Yes.. some of them are extremely complex. I tried to pull Molineux earlier today to give me a landmark in Wolverhampton but MCX would have none of it. Not quite sure why but it forced an 'exception' in the mgfx dll's QE2 doesn't look particularly detailed and it's 3 textures do the lot.. 1 for both sides, 1 for the top and one for the guardrails.. of which there are many. Still.. my pc stutters as it comes into view. I'd better not try Queen Mary then

BTW.. for block texture conversion/renaming, do you save the model first as a particular name then import it again? I guess you have to otherwise the textures would all be prefixed warehouse_model I changed QE2's 3 texture names as I was block converting them. I just changed the name in the texture ref. Easy enough to do with a model and only 3 textures but one heck of a trawl with something like Solent Mills. I'll give it a go on my next model.. probably a block of flats or the MCA building

ATB
DaveB

[GHD]

BTW.. for block texture conversion/renaming, do you save the model first as a particular name then import it again?

I don't see why. Edit the model name and GUID before playing with the textures.

[DaveB]

OK.. thanks

BTW.. I still don't see that 'Prefix all with model name' tab in material editor. Perhaps my MCX is out of date It was only installed in Dec

ATB
DaveB