Some day, but this isn’t our top priority. We are looking at direct upgrade from Blender 2.49.

PBR is something I am looking closely at.

“more than one UV map..” …

-finally!

ahem.. any plans about implementing the Physically Based Rendering (for textures) in the xplane rendering engine? Not only visually it will be a huge blast of an improvement, but also it is an important future proof new rendering technology.

I would also like to hear an update about the state of VR implementation. I tried DCS with the DK2 and was absolutely blown away.

I think spill lights are supported now – the weakness is that the parameters must be entered by hand. If they don’t come over with 3DS, that’s sort of beyond the scope of the exporter. Similarly, translucent glass should just export – be sure to set the Plane-Maker flags appropriately.

The online things I have not found a good solution to is basically two things

1. Windows (transparent windows, tinted windows)
2. Lights (spot, flood, windows lights etc.)

Are any of such included in the new exporter? I.e any lights added in 3ds max exported as obj can be seen in blender and exported further? Or is “night texture” the only option

I wasn’t really thinking of a “shader editor”. More like attaching a vertex/fragment shader in GLSL to an obj file in the same manner as adding a texture. But you’re right, that’s more a OBJ format/rendering engine thing and has little to do with the Blender exporter.

These are features of X-Plane, not Blender, e.g. these are things that the rendering engine could do someday.

I am working on rendering engine improvements – I’ll post about them when we have something definite.

We are very unlikely to add a “shader editor” where you can add either arbitrary shader code or complicated node editing (a la UE4). Much more likely is the shaders will continue to be a menu of options that you can pick from and tune with numeric values and input textures. My thinking is this: the set of effects artists are trying to create with aircraft are relatively uniform; I believe there are material models that could meet people’s needs. I’d like to try them before trying “just code your own.” The engines that provide shader builders exist in a very different ecosystem than X-Plane. So my focus is on a new material model that will let people do what they need to do.

Thanks! I’ll give the hack a try and see how it looks.