Lettering on Hangar

I am a newbie at airport design, and trying to re-do my local small airport N13. The FSX airport N13 is absolutely atrocious, and besides the runway has been lengthened and re-oriented slightly. I have completed the airport layout with ADE and overlaid using Google maps to get it right.

 

The problem I have is adding lettering to a hangar. Attached is the Sketchup rendition of the main hangar at N13, I have been able to place the hangar in the N13 airport using ModelConverterX and ADE. The problem is I cannot find out how to get the lettering to appear on the hangar in FSX. I could not locate anything in this forum related to lettering. After scouring the first 20 pages of posts, I decided to post the question. Can anyone point me to guidance on this?

 

Thanks

 

Gene

Gene,

The lettering needs to be on the texture you already have for that part of the hangar. The texture that looks like glass bricks. The trick is to get it centered. It's possible to do it in Paint but I'm sure there are easier ways. Hope this helps.

 

unclegreg

Thank you unclegeg. I will see if I can make this work. The "glass bricks" was the closest material from the drop down in Sketchup. The lettering in Sketchup was added & treated as a separate object. If I export the whole top part into PaintShopPro (which have) and then export that as a single texture that is what I have to accomplish.

Glad I could help and good luck, Gene. It sounds like you have a good plan.

 

unclegreg

Well “close but no cigar”! I managed to make a reasonable facsimile of the glass blocks with embedded lettering using GIMP (Photoshop would not do it). I imported the result into Sketchup and made it into a material. Then I was able to place this “material” onto the hangar top, then saved and exported the Sketchup file. ModelConverterX imported the file and looked correct. I converted the textures, placed the model into the airport with ADE, compiled and installed into FSX.

 

The result was a couple random pieces, nothing else. The version of the hangar with the “glass” blocks on top came out fine in FSX. The version with the lettered blocks did not work at all. Both models appear correct in ModelConverterX, and both models produced the same errors in the error log about the textures not being powers of 2. After a couple days reworking things the only difference I can think of is the texture file with the embedded lettering is placed on top of the hangar as a single (stretched) instance, not like the repeating textures.

 

Can anyone guide me how to solve this issue? Is it a problem with the sizing? Thanks.

 

Gene

It sounds like a texture size problem. In MCX open the Material Editor. At the bottom of that screen click on Textures. On the top right of that screen click on the arrow next to Save textures. There you will find the option to resize the texture to a power of two. Try converting your Sketchup model with this setting.

Hope this helps.

 

unclegreg

Finally I got it to work correctly. It turns out the main issue was the textures not being divisible by 2. Using GIMP I adjusted both the X and Y values of each texture to be divisible by 2. Then I exported these and placed them back into the Sketchup model. The confusing thing for me is that the model would appear correct in ModelConverterX but not be visible in FSX. Once this problem was solved then the lettering came through just fine.

It took some time for me to learn new tools and figure out how this all works. Thanks for your suggestions.

 

Gene

Glad you stuck with it and learned something new. Knowledge is power.

 

unclegreg