Archives
Useful Links
Categories
-
Recent Posts
Recent Comments
- Tymon J. Douglas on WorldEditor 1.2 Release Candidate 1 Posted
- Ben Supnik on WorldEditor 1.2 Release Candidate 1 Posted
- Greg on WorldEditor 1.2 Release Candidate 1 Posted
- Greg on WorldEditor 1.2 Release Candidate 1 Posted
- Michael Styne on WorldEditor 1.2 Release Candidate 1 Posted
Meta
Category Archives: Modeling
Double Your Framerate: Pre-Fill
That got your attention, eh? Sorry, this is not a tip on how to tune your X-Plane system; it’s a tip for aircraft authors to make sure their 3-d cockpits are running at maximum performance. Prefill is when X-Plane blocks … Continue reading
Posted in Aircraft, Cockpits, Modeling
9 Comments
Customizing Spill Lights – Two Ways
If you are creating an airplane or scenery pack and you need to create a fully customized spill light (visible in HDR mode only in v10) there are two ways to do it. First, we have a parameterized light called … Continue reading
Posted in Modeling, Scenery
2 Comments
Look, Shiny!
Edit: Normally I label the overly technical posts as being for a target audience, but I did not this time. My bad — this post is really only of interest (and will only make sense) to serious 3-d modelers – … Continue reading
Posted in Development, Modeling
16 Comments
Chopped Livery
We have received a number of bug reports on the livery system in X-Plane 10, as well as complaints from both users and authors about how the system works. This post describes what I am thinking for liveries; if this … Continue reading
Posted in Aircraft, Aircraft & Modeling, Modeling
20 Comments
Cutting Back on Shadows
This rather odd 747 picture is from a quick test I did to make sure the shadow options in Plane-Maker were working right after beating the shadow code silly with a hammer. The wing objects have been marked “interior only” … Continue reading
Posted in Aircraft, Aircraft & Modeling, Blooper Reel, Development, Modeling
18 Comments
New OBJ Commands
I have updated the OBJ8 specification with the new X-Plane 10.10 commands. This blog post explains why we added some of these commands. Pixel-Space Drag Manipulator The pixel-space drag manipulator is a new axis manipulator whose drag length is measured … Continue reading
Posted in Cockpits, Development, File Formats, Modeling
11 Comments
Consistency and HDR
At this point the only thing holding up a public beta of 10.10 is, well, me. I am currently working on a set of related aircraft rendering bugs, and as soon as I can get the car off of jacks, … Continue reading
Posted in Aircraft, Development, Modeling
43 Comments
What’s New in OBJects?
I finally finished up an update to the OBJ8 specification, as well as the forest specification – see here for the documents. These specifications are mostly of interest only to developers who are working on scenery exporters. The OBJ specification … Continue reading
Posted in Development, File Formats, Modeling, Scenery
31 Comments
Making Specularity Work For You
This is a screenshot of Javier’s new version of the X-15 for X-Plane 10. In this case I have hacked the rendering engine to show the specular channel* (the alpha channel) of Javier’s normal map as the texture of the … Continue reading
Posted in Aircraft & Modeling, Modeling
8 Comments
X-Plane vs. Blender Normal Maps
Propsman pointed this one out to me yesterday: apparently Blender tangent-space normal maps run from a value of Z=-1 (no blue) to Z=1 (100% blue). This is not how X-Plane normal maps work; our normals go from Z=0 (no blue) … Continue reading