Vitus
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Dear Friends,
I'm happy to announce that there will be Blender2MSFS toolkit uploaded to the fsdeveloper resource section on the 18th of August! I want to give you all a quick heads-up here, while avoiding some pitfalls of the NDA...
While I worked hard to get as many features as I can into the new addon, there will be some limitations to the use for now. For the most part, this is simply due to the lack of documentation of the new sim. For exampleredacted, like redacted won't be included in the addon yet, and need to be added manually right now by editing the glTF files and the accompanying XML file. All those holes will be filled eventually, but with this Blender addon, you'll have the ability to export into the new sim from day one.
The addon is capable of exporting perfectly into the native MSFS glTF 2.0 format. The exporter that will come with my Blender addon, is heavily reliant on the Khronos glTF2.0 exporter that is shipped with Blender 2.83 (and above), however some core function of said exporter had to be re-written to allow for some of the MSFS extensions to be injected.
All of theredacted (big number!) material types that MSFS is utilizing are supported. This includes even some of the more esoteric materials, like redacted and redacted! I try my best to make the materials render similarly in Blender as they will appear in the sim, but there is some limitations to that. Similar to the latest Blender2P3D/FSX toolset, the shader node tree is automatically generated when selecting one of the flight sim materials, and all the necessary values can be accessed through a custom interface.
There's also a batch export available to automatically export different LOD models for your project. The only thing you need to do to allow the batch export, is organizing your scene in collections with a specific identifier for each LOD.
One thing that I need to point out is that this new toolkit is NOT compatible with the Blender2P3D/FSX toolkit! You can leave both installed at the same time, however you won't be able to use them in the same scene. So you'll need to work on different blender files if you want to export to different sims. But since SO MANY THINGS ARE SO, SO, SOOOOO DIFFERENT in the new sim, this seems a necessary thing to do anyway - and we'll get into the details of that on the 18th.
The toolkit will be donation ware, and a number of generous individuals from this community already contributed towards this project, for which I am very grateful! The same individuals also help out by collecting and sharing information and testing the addon, while simultaneously using it for their projects. We also have some valuable help from a few Asobo developers, who answered our questions as best they could and as their time allowed, which is spectacular!
The Blender addon will be licensed under the Apache 2.0 license, so you're essentially free to do whatever you want with it. Use it privately or commercially, for freeware or payware, change or share the code, make it better or worse.
I will continue the development of the addon, as more and more information on the sim becomes available to us and I am planning on putting it up on gitHub after a few iterations, so others can contribute their changes more easily.
Since GMax won't be a viable option for the foreseeable future, I hope to see many of the freeware developers joining the growing community of Blender users here.
I'm happy to announce that there will be Blender2MSFS toolkit uploaded to the fsdeveloper resource section on the 18th of August! I want to give you all a quick heads-up here, while avoiding some pitfalls of the NDA...
While I worked hard to get as many features as I can into the new addon, there will be some limitations to the use for now. For the most part, this is simply due to the lack of documentation of the new sim. For example
The addon is capable of exporting perfectly into the native MSFS glTF 2.0 format. The exporter that will come with my Blender addon, is heavily reliant on the Khronos glTF2.0 exporter that is shipped with Blender 2.83 (and above), however some core function of said exporter had to be re-written to allow for some of the MSFS extensions to be injected.
All of the
There's also a batch export available to automatically export different LOD models for your project. The only thing you need to do to allow the batch export, is organizing your scene in collections with a specific identifier for each LOD.
One thing that I need to point out is that this new toolkit is NOT compatible with the Blender2P3D/FSX toolkit! You can leave both installed at the same time, however you won't be able to use them in the same scene. So you'll need to work on different blender files if you want to export to different sims. But since SO MANY THINGS ARE SO, SO, SOOOOO DIFFERENT in the new sim, this seems a necessary thing to do anyway - and we'll get into the details of that on the 18th.
The toolkit will be donation ware, and a number of generous individuals from this community already contributed towards this project, for which I am very grateful! The same individuals also help out by collecting and sharing information and testing the addon, while simultaneously using it for their projects. We also have some valuable help from a few Asobo developers, who answered our questions as best they could and as their time allowed, which is spectacular!
The Blender addon will be licensed under the Apache 2.0 license, so you're essentially free to do whatever you want with it. Use it privately or commercially, for freeware or payware, change or share the code, make it better or worse.
I will continue the development of the addon, as more and more information on the sim becomes available to us and I am planning on putting it up on gitHub after a few iterations, so others can contribute their changes more easily.
Since GMax won't be a viable option for the foreseeable future, I hope to see many of the freeware developers joining the growing community of Blender users here.
