Welcome to the blog of FSX/P3D developer Dutcheeseblend! Enjoy reading!

Blender2FSX

Dear readers,
 
Some of you may know, but others may not: I'm developing this Fokker aircraft for FSX using the 3D-modelling software Blender. This is rather special I think, since there was no usable approach to get a 3D airplane into FSX from Blender when I started development back in April 2013.
Blender is an open-source, free 3D-modelling application. More information can be found at www.blender.org.
 
The reason for using Blender, was the fact I've been using Blender for four years at the moment of project start. I have used Gmax momentarily in the past, but I felt far more comfortable with Blender. The interface is quite intuitive for me and modelling is straightforward.
 
To prove, or pave, the road from Blender to FSX, I started some experiments in February 2013. Some may have noticed it, it took the shape of the Fresh Breeze Xcitor paramotor. The pic below shows the result of this and it meant a lot to me. Moreover, I have flown this baby in FSX for a number of times, so I regarded time was ready to get started with the D.21
 
  
Early days' workflow
In those days, I used ModelConverterX from mr. Arno Gerretsen (www.scenerydesign.org) extensively. From Blender, I exported a .X file (or some other kind of file, but .X proved to work nice with), which I imported into MCX. There, I assigned the appropriate textures to the model and exported it to .MDL into FSX. But, no animations...
 
To get animations in the model, I exported the file from MCX in a .3ds into Gmax, animated it there and exported it to FSX. Difficult since I wasn't used to Gmax and it was a laborious workflow as well. At that time, model merging became possible in MCX and I used that to merge the animated parts with a static model. I now regard this as mad!
 
Enhanced functionality of the Blender and MCX combination 
In the meanwhile, it was fall 2013 and Arno implemented some very nice features in MCX. Because .X export in Blender now supported animations as well, I could assign animations to the parts using MCX's Animation Editor. That was a great relief, one can understand. Other features of MCX at that time were the MR and VT parser. This was an automatic parser that tagged certain objects with a Mouse Rectangle and a Visibility Tag. This was a workflow as follows:
  • Change the name of an object in Blender from "propeller" to "VT_prop0_still" and from "throttle" to "MR_lever_throttle0"
  • Export the scene from Blender into MCX
  • MCX now automatically assigned the appropriate Visibility Tag and Mouse Rectangle to the objects
That was great! It had its restrictions but I could live with it.

A new, custom Blender2FSX toolset 
But things were to change. Early December 2013, mr. Felix Schneider aka capt_x from the FSDeveloper forum, published his Blender2FSX toolset which was a kind of replication of the ACES toolset for Gmax. After some short development, we now have a complete toolset enabling to export a fully compatible FSX model directly from Blender. Features:
  • Animation tagging
  • Attachpoint adding (effects, mouse rectangles, platform etc.)
  • FSX materials settings
  • Creating LODs
  • Direct export to FSX .MDL
This toolset is really useful. Now, I can change something in the mesh after I encountered a inaccuracy in FSX, hit export to DirectX for FSX, wait a minute and reload my plane in FSX to review the result.
 
The toolset can be retrieved from the first post in the following thread: http://www.fsdeveloper.com/forum/threads/blender-to-fsx-toolset.428090/
Explanation/manual can be found in the FSDeveloper wiki: http://www.fsdeveloper.com/wiki/index.php?title=Blender2FSX_Toolset_manual
 
I'm sure this will encourage others to use Blender as their FSX development tool.
 
Hope this was clear. Many thanks for both workflows go to mr. Arno Gerretsen and mr. Felix Schneider.

4 comments:

  1. hi

    Can you put the file of the xcitor?

    you make a very nice models

    thank's

    nevo

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Hi Nevo,

      Not really ATM. The model is a bit modded for the purpose of Gmax editing. I might consider to do that later, but not planned yet, I'm sorry.

      But thanks for your interest!

      Regards!

      Delete
  2. Hey, I'm a budding modeler. I've basically finished my X-47B in 3Dsmax and now have no clue how to get it into FSX. Can you point me in the right direction?

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Hi Andre,

      Nice to hear! This blog is party dedicated to Blender as the modelling tool, so not to 3DS Max. 3DS is fully supported for FSX development, I advice you to take a peek at fsdeveloper.com.

      Have luck! Cheers, DCB

      Delete