As an historic AC3D customer, being frustrated by the lack of complex modeling tools and overall stability of the application, I was always tempted by Blender, but I was never really able to get it working due to the deepest learning curve ever experienced in a 3D application. Surprisingly, version 2.80 it’s another world, it’s an epic change of usability that allowed me to design the next project entirely with it! Waiting eagerly for the X-Plane plugin to work, thanks again everyone for the effort!

Yes. I’m hoping really hard that people who have Macs are going to be able to benefit from this. I hope the last time you saved your project it was in a working state. This is a special group of users I hope to hear a lot of feedback from.

Honestly, I keep eyeing an old Windows 7 laptop I have in the closet just in case an update to Windows 10 kills Blender 2.49. I’ve avoided updating my graphics card drivers out of superstition. We’ll see. The icon I’ve chosen for the version history track is the Dynamite symbol for “2.49 is a ticking time-bomb”

Good question! Right now Laminar Research is only interested in supporting its Blender addon. The AC3D addon (as part of XPTools, see https:/tools/ac3d-plugin/) gets worked on sometimes as Ben has time and need for it. It is open source, so, the community could take a more active role in developing and maintaining it, if they don’t already. I’m afraid I really don’t follow it. There are other exporters I know of for SketchUp and 3Ds Max of varying degrees of quality.

x-plane.org (not affiliated officially by us) has a 3D Modeling board where you could find more support for your 3D editor and programmers willing to work on your plugin. I’m always happy to have more help making the OBJ spec better, so any exporter or importer developed will likely help with that front!

Lastly, try Blender 2.80’s interface. It is better than 2.79. Maybe a switch wouldn’t be so bad with the new one. Good luck and tell me how it goes.

Yes! This would be so nice and helpful. Thank you so much, again. I know I’ve thanked you in another post or in the forums or whatever, but the BD-5J has been so extremely valuable to the development of XPlane2Blender. It has been a massively useful project – I just can’t even.

If others aren’t quite sure how to release their work, look at this project and look up Creative Commons and GPL so you can feel confident you’ll always recieve credit for your work. If you are distributing the plane or scene for free, why not make the .blend free so others can learn?

Read more about how licenses protect your work and let others use and remix your work more freely: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/ and https://choosealicense.com/

I can’t wait to start modeling with 2.8 !