Project Blender Mesh Tools add-on

[N_Molson]

Ah thank you, I forgot that trick.

What I am getting now look much more consistent. Also, there were some problems with the material properties, and the interior normals were inverted. The shadows now look consistent in regard of the light direction (above).

 

[Spaceman 3D]

Would it be possible to add the ability setting up basic spacecraft parameters within Blender? Like RCS Thruster and Main engine locations using empties.
Also maybee add a way to convert Animations made in Blender to orbiter format and add in the generated dll file

 

[Blake]

The short answer is yes. I would love to have a 'ship creator' type plugin for Blender. It would, at least initially, be a separate tool from this one, although it could work with it. I have also looked at how to define animations that can be exported as part of the 'include' file that is created, but I have not found a method that would be both useful, and not a lot more work then just defining the animation in code. It is still something I think about.

You can include the location of empties in the include file that is built (optionally). I do this a lot. They define thruster locations, animation locations, light location, etc.

An overriding design goal for this tools is to keep it as simple as possible for people to create and edit mesh files for Orbiter in Blender, which is already hard enough to wrap your head around.

But yes, I've had the same dreams you have.

 

[Spaceman 3D]

Does orbiter also take the values for diffuse, metal, roughness from the blender BSDF shader node? Having a seperate "Orbiter material" is kinda confusing
What would also be nice is to have Material node trees automatically get baked into textures. I mostly design procedural materials Example: dirt using noise texture over an existing image texture

 

[Blake]

The Orbiter MESH format is pretty simplistic and knows nothing of shaders and nodes, that's why there is a separate Orbiter Material section. The newer Orbiter clients can handle things like roughness etc. by adding texture files with specific naming conventions.

Using Blender to create textures is something I've been playing with over the past year, baking normal maps and building up 'dirt' layers etc. would be really nice right inside Blender's node editor, then have all of that export in a format Orbiter can consume. I think by that point we would actually be looking at something like support for glTF format directly in Orbiter. There are already exporters for that, then the Blender Orbiter tools could focus more on defining and exporting more 'space ship' concepts that, probably another external tool could convert into either a c++ type DLL, or scripted vessel.

So, I'm hesitant to go down the road to support these node based graphics concepts into the current iteration of Blender Tools because I think there are better approaches to handling this in Orbiter. I don't think we need to re-invent something like glTF with the current mesh format. That said, I really have no idea how difficult it would be to implement glTF in Orbiter. My understanding is that glTF is what MSFS uses, which is why I use that as an example.

 

[Spaceman 3D]

Had the same thought that it might be time to change the mesh format all thogether

 

[dennis.krenz]

So, I'm hesitant to go down the road to support these node based graphics concepts into the current iteration of Blender Tools because I think there are better approaches to handling this in Orbiter. I don't think we need to re-invent something like glTF with the current mesh format. That said, I really have no idea how difficult it would be to implement glTF in Orbiter. My understanding is that glTF is what MSFS uses, which is why I use that as an example.

Also some game engines like OGRE and Bevy use glTF. I think the format is a good choice for a successor for Orbiters MESH format, since it is an open standard and well-supported. Also it covers many features that could be interesting in Orbiter. But at same time, I fear that keeping it backwards compatible will be painful, especially regarding the API which represents the mesh format in Orbiter and would need to block certain operations with glTF.