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Category Archives: Modeling
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
Using Glass Objects in Planes
X-Plane 9 allows you to categorize objects as being on the plane’s outside, inside, or glass. X-Plane depends on these flags being right for a few things: The draw order of the airplane is determined by the object types – … Continue reading
Coping With Variable Rendering Options In X-Plane 10
X-Plane 10 will have rendering options for global illumination and global shadows. This leaves one question: what if the user has these features disabled? The plan for version 10 is this: the OBJ file format will have some extensions to … Continue reading
Posted in Development, File Formats, Modeling, News, Scenery
Tagged file formats, modeling, performance, scenery system, X-Plane 10
3 Comments
Performance Tuning and Future Proofing
I wrote up some performance tuning notes for OBJs on the wiki. A few notes on how these rules will change with version 10: Everything on that note applies to version 10 too. If you’ve tuned your model for version … Continue reading
Use Every Pixel of Your Normal Maps
Normal maps are expensive. A 2048 x 2048 normal map takes 22 MB of VRAM! So make sure you get every bit of image quality you can out of it. Two things to consider: Normal maps are uncompressed (because texture … Continue reading
Revisiting Texture Compression
For quite a while now, I have been advocating in favor of DDS compression. I am pretty damned obstinate, but eventually if enough people yell at me, I get a clue. I have come to appreciate that there are some … Continue reading
Posted in Aircraft, Development, File Formats, Modeling, News
Tagged aircraft, file formats, modeling, performance, X-Plane 10
3 Comments
More Global Illumination Video
I realized I have slightly better test shots of global illumination than the ones that got out a week ago. These are from only a day or two after the last shots. This is the Cirrus again, with landing lights … Continue reading
Posted in Aircraft, Development, Modeling, News, Scenery
Tagged aircraft, modeling, scenery system, X-Plane 10
17 Comments
X-Plane 10 and Global Illumination
Thanks to my foolish use of unprotected directories, we have basically announced that X-Plane 10 will feature global illumination. Here is some basic information on global illumination. What Is Global Illumination? Global illumination is the ability of any part of … Continue reading
Posted in Aircraft, Development, File Formats, Modeling, News, Scenery
Tagged aircraft, file formats, modeling, scenery system, X-Plane 10
5 Comments