Texture Settings

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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
​Relative Paths in Blender​
OBJ8 Spec Sections
​TEXTURE APPLICATION​
​TEXTURE​
​TEXTURE_LIT​
​TEXTURE_NORMAL​
DDS Format
Developer Blog Articles
​DDS Revisited In X-Plane​
​DDS and V10 - What Does It Do?​
​Do Not use DDS as an Editing Format​
​The Case For DDS​
Other Tools
​DDSTool Manual​
Material Settings
Lamp Settings
Last modified 2yr ago
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Contents
What Textures and Materials Mean to X-Plane
Types of Textures
Relevant Blender Settings
Texture Datablocks
Mapping
Influence