Severity:Blocker
(Low - quality of life, workflow optimization, rare enough to not impact production, etc…
High - critical but workarounds are available, important feature not working as expected, frequent enough to impact production
Blocker - prevents from working on the project, prevents from releasing the product)
Marketplace package name: if applicable
Context: Asobo H125
Similar MSFS 2020 issue: insert url here if applicable
Bug description: When trying to apply livery decals made and exported from Blender to a default aircraft (Asobo H125 in this example), the decals on Bone controlled objects aren’t applied. The Front Doors are Bone controlled in the H125, so I have parented the livery to the same bone as the door. On import into the game, the only part of the livery missing is the part parented to the door armature.
Repro steps: Try making a livery with the blender tools for the h125 that is on the front doors.
Parenting directly to a bone/armature unfortunately will not work for decal liveries.
For skinned objects, I highly recommend incorporating the “Bestdani” importer in Blender v2.92 into your workflow. When importing a model with this importer, armatures/bones are converted to nodes/empties. From there, you can grab the nodes/empties that you need, and copy them over to your livery project in a different Blender window (and/or version if you are using a newer one).
Forewarning, these nodes/empties that are generated by the importers are nothing more than a node name and a position. You won’t see anything other than their origin when selected in the viewport, so you’ll have to select/search them in the hierarchy window on the right side of Blender.
Aside from that, you could create your own empties in the same spot as the armature/bone locations as long as they have the same name — but realistically, I find the above workflow to be much easier.
If we open a separate Blender window (2.92 with the Bestdani importer), and then import the H125 model, we can copy that bone name and search for it in the right side hierarchy/outliner window.
In my case, I imported the model twice using 2 importers just for reference for the example, so ignore that bone.
Below that, you can see there is a node with the same name. That is the work of the Bestdani importer. Just click that, copy it, and then paste it into your Blender instance with the rest of the project, along with any other nodes that you may need to parent to.
One other thing to note; the Bestdani importer is a little fragile and outdated, so you may sometimes run into sub primitive errors in the console from time to time with certain models. As long as the empties/nodes are there, that’s fine, no need to worry. Due to this, I generally use the Bestdani importer only for grabbing the empties, and then use other importers for the actual model work + decal making.
