Comments on: Normal Maps in X-Plane 940

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Sat, 22 Aug 2009 19:42:29 +0000

Normal maps... Brilliant!

This is going to allow devs to create some beautiful looking aircraft.

And scenery objects can have them too? That's something that FSX can't do.

By: Steve

Steve — Sat, 22 Aug 2009 11:59:53 +0000

Got it. Then the AC3D-centric workflow stays unchanged as it is now. Work up the model, apply it's "painted" UV map. Once that's happy, one adds the appropriate line to the exported .obj file, realizing subsequent exports will remove it should there be a need for a tweak. One then uses the same UV map file to create a "normal" map. This can only be tested by saving the map at various points in its development to the appropriate aircraft directory and reloading the aircraft in X-Plane.

By: Benjamin Supnik

Benjamin Supnik — Sat, 22 Aug 2009 10:45:35 +0000

It is blender centric, but only because ac3d doesn't have normal map support at all, so it made sense to pick a format that was both reasonably well thought out and already supported by an app.

The capability will be available to ac3d as well, but you may not have a real-time preview of the bump map. Eventually I will add exporter support for it. In the meantime you can easily add your normal map with a single-line edit to the OBJ file.

(My expectation is: the normal map doesn't change the process of modeling since it shares texture coordinates with the main and lit textures.)

Think of it like this: you can use a LIT texture even though you might model using only the day texture. This works because they share texture coordinates. It's the same idea for normal maps.

By: Steve

Steve — Sat, 22 Aug 2009 10:24:18 +0000

This is really, really cool, Ben. But it seems Blender centric. Pardon my 3D app ignorance, but does this mean that normal maps will only be available to those that use Blender, vs. using AC3D?