Object texturing

    Hi, I was wondering what kind of texturing conventions for custom objects Aerofly has. I know that night textures, bump and specular maps are used, but do I need to use a certain naming code for those? I faintly remember that in Prepar3d you had to use the suffix _lm for lightmap to assign a night texture to the respective diffuse texture, eg you'd have a hangar.dds main texture and a hangar_lm.dds as a night texture. Does Aerofly have any restrictions like that too? And what's the maximum texture size that can be assigned to an object? I like to have a single texture sheet for each object to keep number of draw calls low, but for larger objects you'd need 2048x2048 or even 4096x4096 to avoid blurriness, is that possible?

    Thanks, Fabian

    In AFS2 you have to give a _color suffix to your diffuse textures, and then a _light suffix for night textures (instead of _lm).

    Use _bump (or _normal, never tried it but might be accepted) suffix for bump maps, _specular for specular...

    This can be done easily with MCX.

    Cheers

    Antoine

    Config : i7 6900K - 20MB currently set at 3.20GHz, Cooling Noctua NH-U14S, Motherboard ASUS Rampage V Extreme U3.1, RAM HyperX Savage Black Edition 16GB DDR4 3000 MHz, Graphic Card Gigabyte GeForce GTX 1080 8GB, Power supply Corsair RM Series 850W, Windows 10 64 bit.

    I use MCX. In some cases the buildings become partly transparent. Any remedy for this? Like removing the alpha channel in the dds source?

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    AFS2 is a bit nasty with alpha channels, because when there is 1 in the texture any surface becomes randomly transparent.

    In some cases (alpha channels used for glossy effects), getting rid of the alpha channel is enough.

    In most cases (canopy, pylon or crane open structures, statues, trees, etc.) the transparency is however needed.

    The only workaround I found so far was making 2 versions of the texture :

    - the original with alpha channel (32 bit) renamed texutrename_alpha_color.bmp

    - a 24 bit copy without alpha channel, renamed texutrename_color.bmp

    Then I need to manually edit the 3D object (I use 3DSmax, but there are other, more affordable tools) to only apply the texture with alpha channel to surfaces needing it, and the texture without to all other surfaces.

    For that purpose, from MCX I convert the original 3D object to Wavefront format (.obj) for importing into 3DSmax.

    I use the same format to export back to MCX after realllocating the textures, and then in MCX I convert again into collada (.dae) for my standard workflow.

    Hope that bug with alpha channels could be fixed in AFS2, this is the only part of conversion I couldn't get automated in batch process.

    Any other trick/ hint is welcome.

    Cheers

    Antoine

    Config : i7 6900K - 20MB currently set at 3.20GHz, Cooling Noctua NH-U14S, Motherboard ASUS Rampage V Extreme U3.1, RAM HyperX Savage Black Edition 16GB DDR4 3000 MHz, Graphic Card Gigabyte GeForce GTX 1080 8GB, Power supply Corsair RM Series 850W, Windows 10 64 bit.

    Edited once, last by Trespassers (May 13, 2019 at 5:45 PM).