#Ac3d tutorial utube how to

Select the cube in the Object Select mode Anyway, let’s now make sure this material is actually assigned to our cube and that X-Plane will recognize it: I bet that at this point you’d wonder why the hell would anyone use this method when the first one was done in two steps! Well I used to do all of this until today, when I relized that using the AC3D materials is not necessary if the “GLOBAL_specular 1.0” variable is defined. Note: The “Shininess” only affects the look inside AC3D, it does not affect the final XP look in any way. This will give the specular channel a global value of 1.0. In order to see the surfaces shiny in X-Plane, we need to make sure the specular value of the material is 1.0 (full white).Ĭlick on the + next to the Specular and drag all three sliders to the right. Later on, we will use textures to enable LIT effects on the cube. Using Emission on the whole object would not be practical so just forget it and always leave it black. If you made it red, all your textures would turn out to be red too. Right-click on it again, and click Edit MaterialĪlways leave it white. Go to the end of the line of materials, and you should now see the 15th material. Right-click on any of the materials in the Palette and click on Append new material. We can edit the first material, however from experience I found that the default materials often reverse the values to default, so it is better to Append a new material: The only things that will affect the final look in X-Plane are the Diffuse, Specular and Emission.Ĥ. The materials in AC3D don’t really give us many options.

This is really nicely explained in the first link I shared above. This can further be adjusted with normal maps that include specular maps in the blue channel. GLOBAL_specular 1Īdding GLOBAL_specular 1.0 to the header of the OBJ file will make all exported objects 100% shiny (or in other words 0% rough). The AC3D plugin always seems to export that line by default. In a nutshell, we want to add two magical lines to the header of the OBJs: NORMAL_METALNESS GLOBAL_specular 1 NORMAL_METALNESSĪdding NORMAL_METALLNESS to the header will enable the rendering of metallic surfaces in X-Plane. Substance Painter does this automatically when using the X-Plane Export config.

#Ac3d tutorial utube how to

In other words, how to make sure the specular and metallic channels are being applied correctly.įirst of all, this is after you’ve already created a normal texture that contains the specular map in the alpha channel and the metallic map in it’s blue channel. Simply select it in Object Select mode, and hit DEL.Ħ.2 How to make objects shiny/reflective and metallic in X-Plane Now that our cubes are in the group, let’s delete the second one we created.

Here change “group” to “ Test Cube Group” (or whatever you want)ħ. Right-click on the group in the Hierarchy view > Edit Name/Data. If you have a group_B inside of group_A, you won’t be able to rename group_B using Option 1), because the Object Name window will always display the first group (parent one) of the hierarchy, so that is why I am mentioning this Option 2) as well. In more complicated setups, you will have groups inside other groups. Option 2) Through the Object Name/Data window Here change “group” to “ Test Cube Group” (or whatever you want).

Once the group is selected, you can rename it in the left side panel under Object Name. Renaming the group: (this also works for renaming objects)Įnter the Group Select mode (hit “ g” on your keyboard), and then click on either of the boxes in the viewport or in the hierarchy view.