As some of you know, it was my plan to end-of-life the AC3D exporter for X-Plane; the decision was based on having limited resources to develop exporters.

The good news is: Andy Colebourne of Inivis has taken over development of the plugin, and has released the latest version of it – you can find it here. I am linking our download page to his forum link for easy access.

The AC3D plugin shares OBJ import/export code with WED and the rest of the Laminar Research C++ tools; my goal is to not break Andy’s work when working on WED. We use this code not only for WED object preview and the AC3D plugin, but for internal tools that pack up art for the iPhone version of X-Plane, so hopefully there will be some good leverage between the AC3D plugin and other Laminar scenery tools.

About Ben Supnik

Ben is a software engineer who works on X-Plane; he spends most of his days drinking coffee and swearing at the computer -- sometimes at the same time.

12 comments on “Andy Colebourne Takes Over AC3D Plugin Development

  1. Excellent news. I got AC3D a year ago because of X-Plane, so I am happy to hear this work with continue.

  2. Thank You, Thank You, Thank You, I had all but given up hope for a new version of this plug-in. Now I can get back to developing aircraft again.

  3. Not a trivial piece of work, that plugin, particularly for ac3d’s foibles. Good news, indeed (fingers crossed).

  4. That’s extremely good news. I still enjoy using AC3D. I particularly value the way one can edit every object on a UV map at once, rather than one at a time, which is very useful when packing stuff in.

  5. I am a tad on the flip side, it is good he continues the legacy of making AC3D work, hope he fix that.. But I do still wish there was a good working 3dsmax plugin.
    Hopefully there will be something for PBR in the next version, i.e. the use of Substance Painter for texturing.

      1. no longer exporting from max to obj, then importing obj into blender and finaly exporting from blender to x-plane obj…
        this would be soooooooo nice 🙂
        greetings from bavaria
        tom

  6. Hi
    I need to change my email in my “X-plane Scenery Gateway” account but I can only find a place to change my password.
    Can anyone direct me how to update my email address please.

    Regards Pete

  7. This is excellent news! I suspended my Velocity Turbo XL project almost 3 years ago, after ~2500 hours of work because:
    1. The existing AC3d plugin didn’t support the new X-Plane 10 features, and manually editing .acf files after every export was just too much work.
    2. Moving the project over to Blender proved too much of a pain.

    Now it looks like I may be able to resurrect the project. Thank you Ben.

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