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XPlane2Blender v3.4.0-beta.6

Change Log

One big massive bug fix! (and some optimizations!)

#264 caused some people’s lights to be put in the wrong place. The fix involved Ben coming up with awesome math to put things back in their place by a certain offset, and then us creating a way to parse the light.txt file that controls much of the lighting in X-Plane.

This Changes Nothing in Your Blend files!

Seriously! No Blender data should change!

However, It Could Change Your OBJs

XPlane2Blender is now more consistently WYSIWYG! Meaning that if you point a spotlight at a wall, it should show up pointing in that direction, regardless of what a named spill light thinks or the parameters of a param light think.

This is good news for new authors and authors suffering from the bug, but depending on how you’ve been making your lights appear rotated, it could result in needing to change the rotation or parentage of existing lights.

What Lights Are Affected?

All of the following conditions must be true for a light to be affected by this change

  1. Be a Blender non-point light, for instance a spot light
  2. The light’s XPlane Type must be Named or Param
  3. The light’s XPlane Name must be found in the lights.txt file inside the addon’s new resource folder

In rare edge cases, special and less used lights will be excluded from auto correction.

So, as you can see its either somewhat common or very specific which lights are affected. So, if your eyes haven’t glazed over yet,

Please Send Reports Of How This Affects You – Good, Neutral, Or Bad!

We try our best for backwards compatibility and a bug free existence, but we don’t know everyone and their situation until they say hi! If you are faced with large hurdles to continued productivity, please file a bug! Preferably with before and after pictures and .blend files. Automated fixes may be developed for people affected.

This is just one step to a more WYSIWYG XPlane2Blender.

7 comments on “XPlane2Blender v3.4.0-beta.6”

  1. Always glad you guys are making things so much easier for new developers!! Big thanks.
    I have about 75+ new custom buildings complete for a fully custom airport. I have hit a few learning curve hurdles and have hundreds of pages of notes and links trying to get up to speed on X-Plane development.
    Lights are next on the list for getting the airport ready but I have not been able to get my head around how to place them (attaching lights to buildings and inside the fully modeled interior.)
    I think if someone would make a video or instructions it would be tremendous time saver to this total stop I am at now. Admittedly I never even knew you could setup the lights for X-Plane in Blender until I read this. I thought we had to use a spread sheet or run it through Sketchup (only video I found so far).
    I am using Maya LT to model then just running it through Blender (which works perfectly and with great success).
    I am just giving some feedback from a highly dedicated new developer that has spent hundreds of hours developing a new airport.
    I have many other questions but will address them on the forums at the appropriate time. Just to reiterate though – videos on some of the more complex developmental task would help tremendously!

    From the top down the X-Plane staff are the most helpful and fun group of developers I have ever come across. THANK YOU!!!

    1. So glad to hear from you! We hope that lights become easy enough in Blender that no one will have to resort to jumping through multiple pieces of software. Yes, more tutorials are on our list! Thank you for your hours making X-Plane a better sim!

  2. I have been waiting for this feature for such a long time. I’ve always had to manually convert the Blender euler format to X-Plane’s direction vector format for each individual light. For anyone interested in knowing, here’s how I did the conversion (imagine doing this individually for hundreds of lights!):

    X-Plane Coordinate System:

    X: -West +East
    Y: -Ground +Sky
    Z: -North +South

    Blender XYZ Euler to X-Plane:

    dX = sin(degZ) * cos(degX)
    dY = sin(degZ)
    dZ = cos(degZ) * cos(degX)

  3. I did not get into XP11 lights magic yet but I wanted to say thank you Ted and Ben for working and improving things for developers.

    Looking forward to more documentation/tutorials.

  4. Please, I would like an answer, it has been almost a week since 11.10b7 was released and has not yet come to steam, does anyone have any prediction of when they will be available on steam ??

    Forgive me for asking this question here, but I did not find where to do it.

    1. Hi Carlos,
      I do not have a prediction on this. Beta 7 wasn’t ready when Philipp had to leave for a trade show, but we knew b6 was going to be obsolete. So it depends on when he is back and can cut a beta.

      cheers
      Ben

      1. Thank you very much for the response Ben, version 11.10 this is to become definitive or official?

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