XPlane2Blender does not actually have any texture settings. However, certain Blender settings affect the export and even creation of new textures.
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.
An the albedo texture
None
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.
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.
Coordinates
- Must be set to UV
Map
- Every texture must have a UV Map
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 |
| Albedo (daytime) Texture | None |
| Lit (night time) Texture | None |
| 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 |
| Normal Texture | None |
Blender Manual
OBJ8 Spec Sections
​TEXTURE APPLICATION​
​TEXTURE​
​TEXTURE_LIT​
​TEXTURE_NORMAL​
Developer Blog Articles
​DDS Revisited In X-Plane​
​The Case For DDS​
Other Tools
​DDSTool Manual​