ORBITER MESH MATERIAL GENERATOR

USER MANUAL
By Jos Pablo Luna Snchez. 2009.

DISCLAIMER
This software is free. You are authorized to use it for personal and non commercial purposes only. There is no guarantee or support associated to this software. Use it on your own risk.

ORBITER MESH MATERIAL GENERATOR

This software allows you to generate material code for Orbiter MSH meshes. Meshes are 3D objects used by Orbiter to represent buildings and spacecraft. This software is for add-on makers who want to tweak the materials of their meshes. Orbiter has a very particular way to represent materials that differ from 3D modelers. In order to preserve visual accuracy, this software was created, so modelers may edit MSH files using Windows Notepad. Another problem that add-on makers face, comes when it is a time to preview materials. This tool allows to preview specularity and material color, and automates generation of data. You do not need to be an expert in color and mesh construction. This software may not add the flexibility of editing all variables of Orbiter materials, but it allows to create a general visual appearance for colors very quickly.

UNDERSTANDING USER INTERFACE

Material name: It must be text with no spaces. Color: It is the color of the surface. If textured, it will color the texture. Transparency: 0 means opaque, 1 means transparent. Specularity: It refers to the amount of shining factor of a material. It shows a preview of how specularity may look on a grey surface. Glass material: This option overrides and ignores all data, except for material name, to create the appearance of transparent glass. Material is textured: If the material is intended to be used on a textured surface, check this option. Color in Orbiter seems to be represented differently on textured and non textured surfaces. This program makes the adjustments for you. Artificial light: If this material will be exposed to artificial light, like the interior of a spacecraft, which will be exposed to artificial light when orbiting the night side of a planet, check this option.

HOW TO USE THE PROGRAM

Put the cursor on top of any of the colored numbers and drag to the left or right to change the material color. You will see them changing as you drag the mouse.

Input the rest of the data and press Generate button.

Copy the material code and paste code in your mesh.

Press Clear button if you want to create another material.

Notes
When attempting to export meshes from any modeler to Orbiter, some material data may be lost or corrupted. These gaps were properly documented in the manual of Mesh Wizard with the hope that the authors of conversions might want to adjust their tools. My experience shows that the best convertor from AN8 and 3DS to MSH format seems to be Dennis Krenz Anim8or script by the day this manual was written. However, the differences in the way of representing materials between modelers and Orbiter, gave the reasons to design this tool. The same words mean different concepts in Orbiter and 3D modeling software, so there is no exact translation of mesh data between 3D objects created by modeling software and MSH files. So the human intervention was required. How are materials going to be used in the Orbiter mesh? This is the tricky part that makes any software conversion inaccurate. A software converter has no way to know, it cant fill the gaps of missing information that involves the purpose of the add-on maker. Experienced addon makers may notice that color in this software refers to diffuse color. Transparency refers to diffuse opacity. Specularity color, specularity opacity and specular power were combined in a single list of presets to make things easier. Ambient and emissive are processed automatically using some logical criteria to avoid undesired results, produced by newbie add-on makers that may not look very cool in Orbiter. Both color ranges, from 0 to 255 and 0 to 1 have been added so add-on makers may have an idea of the degree of color they are adding. Hopefully, working with colors may be a bit easier, and hopefully you may find it useful.