Modeling Documentation

Guides

Title Updated Description
Building Custom 3-D Trees 9 Jun 2022 This article explains X-Plane 12's requirements for customizing or adding new 3-D trees.
Designing Manipulators for Virtual Reality 13 Jun 2019
Lighting Level of Detail 14 Feb 2018 Guidelines on specifying LOD for lights.
Optimizing Object Peformance 22 Dec 2015 A guide to optimizing the detail, geometry, and count for objects.

Tips & Tricks

Title Updated Description
Power of 2 In Art Assets 14 Feb 2018 An explanation of "power of 2" resolutions as required by X-Plane art assets.
Additive Lighting 14 Feb 2018 Explanation of additive lighting in X-Plane.

Reference

Title Updated Description
Normal Maps 6 Jan 2020 Normal maps are textures that defines which way light bounces off a surface. This article explains how to create, use, and troubleshoot normal maps.
X-Plane 11 Particle System 29 Sep 2018 Details of the X-Plane 11 particle system, including particle types, emitter types, and effect types.
All About Clamping Animations 7 Jun 2018 Details about how to control X-Plane's ability to guess how to animate your object when you haven't specified a keyframe for a dataref value; a technique known as "Clamping Animations".
Managing Translucency 14 Feb 2018 An explanation of why translucency is problematic & how to work with it properly for X-Plane.
Custom Lights 16 Dec 2015 Custom lights are Lighting Billboards that can be customized as part of an OBJ. This article discusses the mechanism behind custom light billboards in detail.
Title Updated Description
lights.txt File Format 10 Jun 2020 The lights.txt file provides X-Plane's rendering engine with instructions on how to make lights with names for other parts of the art system to reference