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34_texture_settings.md

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Texture Settings

XPlane2Blender does not actually have any texture settings. However, certain Blender settings affect the export and even creation of new textures.

What Textures and Materials Mean to X-Plane

As stated before, very little Blender information related to materials actually gets written to an OBJ. Instead, most of what changes what an object looks like in Blender comes from Texture work.

An OBJ file does not contain the texture, but rather, the path to the image file. Only .png and .dds file types are allowed. .dds files have special considerations, see the Further Reading at the bottom.

Types of Textures

Albedo (day time) Texture

An the albedo texture

Lit (night time) Texture

Specular Texture

Normal Texture

Relevant Blender Settings

None

Texture Datablocks

Material Texture Slots - A list of texture slots. XPlane2Blender will inspect these and attempt to use them during export. Each slot must be an "Image or Movie" type. The order of the slots is not important.

Image

  • Source - Can be Generated or "Single Image" Generated textures must be composit-able and saved as a real file to be referenced in an OBJ

  • Image/Movie File Name - If Source is "Single Image", this is the file path of the image. OBJs refer to their images relative to their own location, not an absolute path like C:\Users\Me\plane_project\images\landing_gear.png. You should keep paths relative to the .blend file to avoid distribution problems. Blender uses // in paths to refer to "the folder the .blend file is in". Blender and XPlane2Blender also supports the use of .. (meaning one parent folder) and . (meaning the current folder).

    For example: An image at //images/landing_gear.png would be read as "Starting at the folder the .blend file is in (//), looking in the folder images for the file landing_gear.png. Naming a layer ../test_objs/landing_gear.obj would export the OBJ landing_gear to the folder test_objs, which is in the parent folder of the .blend file. No user folder or drive letter is referenced, making the project a lot more portable.

Mapping

  • Coordinates - Must be set to UV
  • Map - Every texture must have a UV Map

Influence

XPlane2Blender uses which influence options to determine the purpose of each texture. This is important for many parts XPlane2Blender, from Autodetect Textures, Composite Normal-Textures, which OBJ attributes to write, and certain validations.

Property Texture Purpose Use of Value
Diffuse->Color Albedo (daytime) Texture None
Shading->Emit Lit (night time) Texture None
Specular->Intensity Specular Texture Intensity value is used to accumulate the total specularity of all the material's texture slots (in addition to the material's own Specular Intensity)
Geometry->Normal Normal Texture None

Further Reading

Blender Manual

OBJ8 Spec Sections

DDS Format

Developer Blog Articles

Other Tools