#Ac3d plugin blender install#
#Ac3d plugin blender software#
#Ac3d plugin blender windows#

Covering the basics of nodes is out of the scope of this tutorial, and it's assumed you're already reasonably comfortable with them. Nodes are a vast topic on its own, and there's no such thing like the one and only valid setup. Node setup This is where the vital part comes - planning your material node connections to suit your needs.

#Ac3d plugin blender windows#

In my case, the stray yellow one was a result of me mistakingly joining the windows with the fuselage.Ĥ. If your object has more than one material assigned to it, you can remove the excessive ones, since we only need one per object: The important thing to note here is that you SHOULD NOT join things that don't share the same texture and UV map - usually wing parts and fuselage - UVs are merged as well, which would result in a huge mess of unrelated UV maps mangled together.Īfter you're done with this, you can move on to setting up the materials. You might want to join (CTRL+J) remaining objects into one mesh, to make the painting easier (so you won't be needing to switch between active elements constantly when crossing Select all elements you want to hide and press H. Setting up the scene and materials Now you'll usually want to hide some parts of the model, like glass elements of the windows (and in case of this specific example, also water floats, since default C172 comes with two landing gear types, and we're going to work on each one separately to avoid clutter in the scene). Start it and import the OBJ file created by AC3D.ģ. Pick some temporary work directory you'll be keeping all the files in and save it there. After this is done, select Export from the File menu, and pick Wavefront OBJ (.obj). Import all of of them, one after another. Depending on the plane, there will be varying number of OBJ files, since X-Plane aircraft models come in segmented fashion. Hit CTRL+I, and navigate to the objects subfolder inside the main directory of your aircraft.

#Ac3d plugin blender install#

Install AC3D and X-Plane import/export plugin and run the program. If you happen to know about better methods to deal with importing planes into Blender, don't hesitate to let me know. Side note: It should be possible to export to Wavefront OBJ directly from Plane Maker, but for whaveter reason it has never worked for me, creating invalid files. Since there's no reliable Blender addon capable of achieving this (i have tried, but it's a total hit&miss case, with a strong lean towards the latter, sadly), we're going to use another program as an intermediary step, to load the objects and export them to plain Wavefront OBJ file, readable directly by Blender. Importing the aircraft model You need to import the model you'll be painting into Blender first.

The aircraft used in my example is the default Cessna 172 Skyhawk.Ģ. You can follow the general workflow idea of this tutorial with a different set of tools (3ds Max/Maya in place of Blender, Photoshop instead of Krita etc), but i cannot guarantee you'll be able to achieve the same results, as it won't translate 1:1 in such case. ♲ Blender 2.77 or newer ) ♳ Krita 3.3.2 or newer () ♴ XPTools () I'm also assuming you have some basic proficiency at using Blender and navigating through its UI.

♱ AC3D () with X-Plane OBJ import/export plugin ()

#Ac3d plugin blender software#

Software we're going to be using This tutorial assumes you are using a Windows machine and have the following programs set up:

This is basically what sparked the idea of writing up this tutorial, which will focus on painting the livery in Blender.ġ. Having to paint directly on the image in a graphics editing program (often without a UV map reference layer), saving the texture and reloading the model in Plane Maker every once in a while is not an approach i'd be able to put up with myself, especially knowing that there are much better ways to do it. X-Plane 11 livery creation with Blender Foreword After having done a bit of research on a typical livery creation process for X-Plane, i had noticed that virtually none of tutorials I stumbled upon incorporates actual 3D modelling software into the worflow to help visualise the edits being made to the texture.