After exporting SimpleAircraft_LOD00 aircraft loads without textures

I’m trying to learn about aircraft creation, but I’m a Blender newbie so what I want to be able to do is experiment by making small modifications to the SimpleAircraft sample model and then wire them up in the sim.

At the moment, I’m just trying to import SimpleAircraft_LOD00.gltf into Blender 3.6 and then export it back out (without modification) so I can see it in the sim to verify my process. When I do this, the textures are missing in the sim. After I build the project, I select it in the aircraft picker, click the Configure button and the result is that I get a pink aircraft in the hangar.

Here is my process so far: After importing the model, I reattached the textures via File->External Data->Find Missing Files. I then packed and unpacked them. I export to …\SimpleAircraft\Blender\Export (where SimpleAircraft is the project directory root) and that works as expected. I get the .gltf, .bin and a texture directory. That said, if I use the Multi-Export, only some textures are written to .\texture. However, I do get all of the textures if I use File->Export->glTF 2.0, so that is what I’m using. Once the export completes, I hand edit the generated SimpleAircraft_LOD00.gltf so that the pilot textures all point to texture.base (instead of texture), copy the updated .gltf and .bin into the model directory in package sources and build the project. I haven’t been copying the textures since they weren’t changed and also because I can’t get the Multi-Exporter to export all of them, so I’m currently not able to generate all of the necessary xml files (as File->Export doesn’t do that).

My export settings for Mesh include “Apply Modifiers” and Materials are set to Export. I checked (Limit to) “Visible Objects” under Include. Other than that, after I imported, the only thing I changed was to delete the camera and move all of the meshes except the light into a collection named SimpleAircraft_LOD00.

I don’t get any build errors, but I am seeing three warnings in the debug console when I go to view the aircraft in the hangar:

VFS Bitmap Loader | Attempt to load texturefor incompatible texture slots. This is not supported; please duplicate your texture:‘vfs://mycompany-aircraft-simple/simobjects/airplanes/mycompany_simple_aircraft/common/texture/simpleaircraft_cockpit_comp.png.ktx2’.

VFS Bitmap Loader | Attempt to load texturefor incompatible texture slots. This is not supported; please duplicate your texture:‘vfs://mycompany-aircraft-simple/simobjects/airplanes/mycompany_simple_aircraft/liveries/mycompany/alu/texture.exterior/simpleaircraft_fuselage_comp.png.ktx2’.

VFS Bitmap Loader | Attempt to load texturefor incompatible texture slots. This is not supported; please duplicate your texture:‘vfs://mycompany-aircraft-simple/simobjects/airplanes/mycompany_simple_aircraft/liveries/mycompany/alu/texture.exterior/simpleaircraft_wings_comp.png.ktx2’.

I’m not sure if these warnings are related to the problem, but since I didn’t change the texture.xml files my initial thought is that they are unrelated.

If I just build SimpleAircraft directly from the SDK, it displays correctly with all textures, so clearly I’m doing something wrong. Anybody have any ideas what the problem might be? Additionally, does anyone know how I can get the Multi-Exporter to export all of the textures? Thanks!

Ok, I was able to get this working. After importing the model into Blender, it is necessary to manually go through the meshes and set MSFS2024 Material Parameters Type property to Standard in Material Properties. Then the requisite base, occlusion and normal texture files must be manually hooked up (also under MSFS2024 Material Parameters). Kind of a pain, but there it is.

Importing for re-export has never really been a thing. In my experience with a project where we did import an MSFS GLTF, even with a custom blender plugin that imports more data than the Khronos plugin, I still had to recreate all of the materials, rebuild the armatures and weights from scratch (with a bit of futzing around to get the correct neutral pose to start with), and fix a lot of shading issues. It was several weeks of weekend and evening work to get it to an acceptable point.

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