Thank you Ben for that response. Please don’t misunderstand me, I wasn’t requesting support, merely clarification I was trying to understand how Xplane handles the graphics in the cockpit, with relation to imported geometry and animated texture panel mapping of that object versus the native panel creation through plane maker. I hope this makes some sense. If you would like to correspond by e-mail I am more than happy to do that. I have held aviation close to my heart for more than 50 years and worked with computers for the last 30 before I retired. I say this because I don’t want you to think that I am looking to waste your time I know firsthand how busy and hectic things get when developing applications and answering customer queries such as this so once again I thank you for your patience.
Jim

Hi Jim,

I can’t help you with ac3d work-flow problems (and this blog post isn’t really the appropriate place for support requests).

I do intend to update the ac3d plugin to be current to v10; I also plan to submit my mods of the Blenders scripts to Marginal (that’s in my court – he set up GIThub for me and I need to push the changes), as those mods bring his scripts into sync with v10.

There is already a 3ds exporter – see here.

http://www.steptosky.com/forum/index.php?topic=22.0

Jim Zane
JazAero Aviation

I have the latest Blender.

I have the scripts from here (after locating the overly subtle download link on the page) and they are installed – I can see X-Plane export.
https://github.com/der-On/XPlane2Blender

I have used Plane Maker to create .obj files from one of my planes.

I seem to be missing the ability to import the X-Plane created .obj files into Blender for editing or instructions on how to do so.

Could somebody please direct me to a current tutorial?

Uh, you should _never_ use a misc body inside-out to represent a cabin. We’re not taking it away because we didn’t think that that existed. Don’t do that – the physics calculations will be wrong.

Misc bodies _can_ overlap. If they do, they will render correctly from the outside. I don’t know what the physics engine will do; only Austin knows that. In some cases the physics engine understands overlapping and connected bodies and in some cases it does not.

I’m not sure I understand the question about the object. Basically when _any_ two meshes overlap, you will see overlapped geometry. It will render ‘correctly’ if what you want are two intersecting sets of triangles.

The sim will not (and has never) clip out the “interior” of overlapping geometry. In other words, if you were two make two overlapping spheres, we would not make a new, single manifold hull surrounding all points in space that are inside at least one sphere. Instead we would draw both spheres, overlap and all.

But this isn’t really a change in how we darw, it is a change in options. Basically “draw inside of bodies” is the equivalent (using plane-maker built-in drawing) of ATTR_no_cull in an OBJ, and we are taking it away.

Our long term goal is to strip away all of the strange partial measures that were put into Plane-Maker during the X-Plane 6/7 era to try to fake detailed drawing before we had real 3-d attached to Airplanes (via OBJs) with real animation and real modeling programs.

Right now there are a ton of random options that affect drawing, and the resulting code is complex, tweaky, buggy, and a maintenance nightmare. As we try to advance rendering forward to get things like HDR to work better, we don’t want to pay the maintenance tax of keeping the v7 interfaces alive. So we’re slowly starting to deprecate them.

OBJ geometry!