EXPERIMENTAL USE ONLY!!! -- [What?] -- Login to add public annotations [How? >>YouTube].

Download this from GitHub!

XPlane2Blender v4.1.0-alpha.1

This alpha contains changes to the updater. Make backups before using!

Global Material Settings -> OBJ Settings

This new version contains one of the most requested fixes (#357, #599) for XPlane2Blender: Normal Metalness, Blend Glass, and Global Tint have been moved out of the Material Properties Tab and into OBJ Settings! The annoying “All Materials in an obj must have the same Normal Metalness/Blend Glass Value” error is gone!

The updater tries its best to guess if you wanted Normal Metalness, Blend Glass, or Global Tint, however it isn’t perfect. If you have to manually correct more than 3 of your OBJ settings, please tell me.

These new settings can be found under the Textures section of the OBJ Settings.

global_material_options

Emissive Panel Texture Only and Panel Mode Selector

#595 Also known as ATTR_cockpit_lit_only, this directive has actually been in X-Plane since 11.10, but now is accessible in XPlane2Blender! It makes a panel only use the emissive “Lit” texture – a great speed boost if that is all you need. This is the perfect feature for computer displays.

For Aircraft or Cockpit export types, look in the Cockpit section for “Panel Mode”. This changes the meaning of “Part of Cockpit Panel” for the whole OBJ. Setting it to “Emissive Panel Texture Only” mode activates the feature. You cannot mix panel modes.

emissive_panel_texture_only

Cockpit Regions

People who use Cockpit Regions will have to manually change “Panel Mode” from Default to Regions to see the UI and have regions export again. A one time fix. A future updater will do it for you. Until then I hope it isn’t too many OBJs to change.

Updater Version History Synchronization

#471 The updater now synchronizes its last version across every scene and new updater functions will not use data cleaning to protect against accidental or purposeful updater re-runs. Simply put this means a safer to use XPlane2Blender (but still make backups). Since this is new updater code, however, it had to be put in an alpha. People with multiple scenes should be especially on the look out for problems. I feel very confident about it however.

With testers and users like the ones XPlane2Blender has we’ll be getting to v4.1.0-rc.1 much much much much faster this time! For the users who requested moving Normal Metalness and Blend Glass, thank you for your patience. I know now just how annoying that error message was! I’ll certainly keep this experience in mind for future decisions and don’t worry, “make it the same across every material” is not going to be chosen again without an extremely important reason!

11 comments on “XPlane2Blender v4.1.0-alpha.1”

      1. Hi Ted

        Yes, it’s an update for sure. But I am talking about what most of us are waiting, news about Xplane development/new features.
        I mean, in the past months I used to come here more than twice a week and I saw that everytime there was an update about Vulkan development progress.
        Last update of that kind was at the beginning of September with a news about RC release.

        This is subjective but I feel like in a house when in the past months there was a big party and now it ended, leaving the house empty and silent 🙂

        Thanks
        Keep up the good work.

  2. Ted.
    I’m sure it wasn’t the idea to “steal your thunder” 🙂
    I haven’t used Blender for some time but following all news about it.
    It sounds like you have done an (another) amazing job on the Xplane2Blender stuff!

    I am wondering if you could also “change” things in the OBJ files like making user objects stackable (as now they are not) ?
    I guess it’s a LR thing though.
    Thank you anyway for the update and your work! <3
    Chris

  3. Hi Ted.
    What I mean is eg. 2 user objects that can be stacked on top of each other.
    Imagine a helicopter building a tower in 2-3 parts, or you want to land a person on top of a (user made) object etc.

    Even with _hard surface, a user object stacked on top of another object sink down to ground.
    (Sometimes) they magically flow on top of the first (bottom) object 🙂

    1. This is an interesting question. The way I’d think to solve this is to model the building and helipad together, or, to model the helipad with a vertical offset as large as needed – the helipad vertices start 60 meters int the air. There are obvious downsides about that – it isn’t modular at all. Let me ask if there is anyway to do this. There is also a manual edit – you could use a single ANIM_trans to offset everything without modeling but that kind of hack is really not good.

    2. The tip I got was to use WorldEditor’s MSL property for Objects. There isn’t a good way to automate that but if I were you I’d put the height of the tower in the file name so the info is quickly available. Or use some scratch paper.

Comments are closed.