Hi Fred,

When it comes to flat/smooth shading, duplicating vertices to make a hard edge is STRONGLY PREFERRED over ATTR_flat shading.

Vertices are very cheap, and the dupes won’t kill you. The GPU can do a LOT of vertices. ATTRibutes are expensive – the GPU pipeline has to be reconfigured.

So – it is intentional that the WYSIWYG shading of Blender comes out as vertex mesh tricks and not attributes.

If you have a way of controlling flat/smooth shading that is WYSIWYG but is ignored by us, please file a bug. But we will solve this by exporting more vertices. 🙂

(The same logic goes for two-sided geometry!)

Would it be possible to export flat/smooth shade per element (vertices, edges, faces) to X-Plane? Right now X-Plane only supports flat/smooth shade for entire objects. If we could control the shading of each element (vertex normals) we could get rid of using the edge split modifier in blender, which is the actual workaround and actually duplicates vertices and has some other inconvenients.

Thanks!

atgcab

It does not have an import function, and likely never will without significant investment by the community. Some projects exist, and they could be absorbed as part of this project, but I know I certainly could not spend time on them because of a long queue of requested features for the exporter.

Thank you for asking however and making your opinion known. This is somewhat off-topic for this thread, so, please e-mail me why you’d like to see an import function so I can mark it down!

Hi Rodrigo,

The X-Plane 11 material model doesn’t distinguish reflectivity from metalness – when you increase the _base_ reflectivity (that is, the reflectivity when viewed straight on, of a material) by raising the blue channel, you make it “more reflective always”, and we start to use the albedo to tint reflections, rather than the diffuse light. This works because, at full base reflectivity there IS no diffuse light – all light bounces right off the surface of the material.

In other words, you use the same functionality for reflective metallic and mirrored windows.

Regular (non-mirrored) windows probably do NOT need any custom metalness values – the F0 (base reflectivity) of glass is somewhere between 0.04 and 0.06 if I remember right – convenient – otherwise you wouldn’t be able to look through glass. 🙂 But do note that really correct glass blending is currently only available on glass objects on an airplane. This is (for now) a fundamental limit of the scenery system, which doesn’t have a post-g-buffer ‘glass’ mode the way aircraft do. That is something that is on our todo list.

Hello Mr. Greene,
Does it have import function?

Yes, it should. I’m using 2.78b and its worked so far.