MSFS20 Blender and Taxilines For MSFS

[anarkia2004tj]

Hello all, I am having a bit of trouble with many aspects of modeling taxi lines and edge lines in blender. First off, I am a beginner in this, and have been watching and practicing for many hours now, and have started to get a grip of things. I am in the process of exporting my models into MSFS using the blender2msfs tool, and when I do this, the sim displays absolutely nothing. I have followed some youtube tutorials and can get the object to display in the scenery editor within the sim, but all I get is an "empty" box. Now I know that there may be several things I need to fix, but here is what I have done so far:

- I'm not sure if related or not, but all the lines were already converted from mesh to curves and back to mesh in blender, but somehow only a few show a "grey" face and some appear to not have any material on them. (see the first pic)
-Just yesterday, the lines where all showing as solid objects and showed this grey material, and I don't recall changing anything apart from converting from curve back to mesh
- I tried adding a plane and giving it volume to see if it shows in the sim, no luck.
- I tried a cube, nothing shows.

In the sim editor:
- I am able to see my model as a scenery object ( after a successful build of the package) and manipulate it, but it only shows the boundary box
-I have built the package, restarted the sim, placed it in the community folder, and even tried removing all files and folders, and starting from scratch on a clean project.
- I have tried the "snap to ground" option on and off in case it merged with the terrain

P.S. I originally wanted to create this airport with only the in-sim editor and my own textures, but the quality of the painted lines and taxi lines is pretty bad. I read here that using your own model and then making it flat as a projected-mesh is the solution, so that is what I'm ultimately trying to do. Any pointers and tips will be greatly appreciated.


Thank you.

 

[neinnunb]

My recommendation before trying anything else, in blender, right before you export, select all the objects you are exporting and hit CTRL-A (Apply) and select "All Transforms". See if that fixes your issue.

Edit: by the way, only put in community folder when you want to test your scenery without going into dev mode. After tests, remove it before coming back into dev mode to work on your scenery.

 

[anarkia2004tj]

My recommendation before trying anything else, in blender, right before you export, select all the objects you are exporting and hit CTRL-A (Apply) and select "All Transforms". See if that fixes your issue.

Edit: by the way, only put in community folder when you want to test your scenery without going into dev mode. After tests, remove it before coming back into dev mode to work on your scenery.

Thank you for the input, unfortunately, it did not fix the issue. I somehow am able to see ONLY the lines which have materials. and if I don't place my scenery objects inside my community folder, I can't see them at all for testing or editing, do you think i should restart my sdk? In the tutorial videos I saw, their scenery objects loaded with a simple package build and a project reload.

 

[neinnunb]

I somehow am able to see ONLY the lines which have materials.

I think that is your issue right there. Everything has to have at least one type of MSFS material, or else it won't show. This is normal. All of the lines (taxi way lines, etc) need to have the "MSFS Standard" material assigned to it.

One tip: You can use the same material for all of your lines (as long as it uses the same texture file). You can easily assign one material to all of your lines by selecting the line that has it already, then select all other lines (making sure the original is the active selection) and hit CTRL-L to make link and choose "Materials".

 

[anarkia2004tj]

I think that is your issue right there. Everything has to have at least one type of MSFS material, or else it won't show. This is normal. All of the lines (taxi way lines, etc) need to have the "MSFS Standard" material assigned to it.

One tip: You can use the same material for all of your lines (as long as it uses the same texture file). You can easily assign one material to all of your lines by selecting the line that has it already, then select all other lines (making sure the original is the active selection) and hit CTRL-L to make link and choose "Materials".

ok, i will give this a go, thank you so much!

 

[Impulse Simulations]

Additional question, I have created my line via a curve, then converted to a mesh. shows in game, what would the most ideal way of texturing this be because if I unwrap it, it shows in the UV as the bent lines etc.

 

[ZdenniZ]

Additional question, I have created my line via a curve, then converted to a mesh. shows in game, what would the most ideal way of texturing this be because if I unwrap it, it shows in the UV as the bent lines etc.

You need to use the "follow active quads" workflow. This way you UV unwrap just the first segment of the line, all other get unwrapped as straight line automatically.