MSFS20 Blender2MSFS support thread

[Vitus]

If the mesh looks hollow, first double check the normals of the mesh and confirm that they're pointing in the right direction. If the geometry checks out, it can be a number of things. If it's an issue with the normal map, remove it and see if that helps. If it's more of a lighting issue, then make sure that you have an adequate AO map assigned - the sim is quite sensitive when it comes to that. If you don't have an AO map, maybe set this to a mid-grey value.

Notice though that metallic != reflective!
It's actually rather the Roughness map that controls how shine the surface is. The rougher the surface (more white), the more the light gets scattered. The Metallic value sets HOW the light gets reflected. You can see that in action when going through the different documents about material in the SDK.

 

[Michael2]

I am now trying to implement my clickspots and I can't get them to work. I'm not using templates or anything in the model behavior section of the xml file, but rather FSX style animation/clickspots in the model info section. It all works with the Max exported model. I have animations without mouse code working, so really I'm not sure what the problem is.

Edit: Never mind. Making some progress with this so I'll carry on... Would delete post if I could.

 

[Vitus]

@Michael2: rather than erasing your steps, share what went wrong, so the rest of us know what to look out for! Btw. I'd recommend switching to the new template format. It's actually quite ingenious.

@everyone: I just uploaded the new version to the resource section, pending moderator's approval.
Changelog (10.09.2020):

• Forked more files from the original Khronos Exporter to facilitate:
• Fix of the emissveFactor of the msfs materials. This value should now be properly set in the glTF file.
• Fixed the UV offsets for the detail map, should work as expected now.
• I could've sworn there was something else... I forgot. You'll find out, I'm sure.

And again my thanks to everyone who's come forward and donated towards this project. Your support is greatly appreciated!

 

[Tangerine]

Thx for your work @Vitus (going to make a contribution later this week)
For some reason and after using Substance Painter, PBR Textures they look great in Blender, but somehow they get darken in the sim.
When you talked about Roughness and Metal Sliders on the Post above. Are you talking about the one that comes with your exporter, or the ones from Substance Painter?

 

[MANOCHVARMA RAMAN]

Why am I getting this error when wanted to activate the toolset (0.37.0)? Never get this error on previous version(0.36.1).
.

 

[Vitus]

@Tangerine what about your AO map? I had some trouble with the lighting of my model at first, and it came down to the AO map. If it's too dark or too white, it'll look off in the sim. I adjusted my workflow to now bake the AO maps in Blender. Check out this post for a step-by-step. Maybe that helps?

Are you talking about the one that comes with your exporter, or the ones from Substance Painter?

That was more for a workflow without Substance Painter and just looking at the metallic texture that you plug into the sim. The metallic and roughness value that come out of Substance work very well. So I'm pretty sure your issue lies somewhere else - either in a messed up AO or normal map.

@MANOCHVARMA RAMAN Hey man! Welcome to the next round
I haven't seen this yet, but it looks like there might be an incompatibility with Blender 2.9. Which is sub-optimal....
Could you try using the last 2.83.6 version of Blender and check if the problem still occurs?

It looks like this is caused by a change of the Khronos Exporter, that means I can probably fix it by forking more of the original code into our toolkit.

 

[MANOCHVARMA RAMAN]

@MANOCHVARMA RAMAN Hey man! Welcome to the next round

Ha ha . Thank you brother.

@MANOCHVARMA RAMAN I haven't seen this yet, but it looks like there might be an incompatibility with Blender 2.9. Which is sub-optimal....
Could you try using the last 2.83.6 version of Blender and check if the problem still occurs?

It looks like this is caused by a change of the Khronos Exporter, that means I can probably fix it by forking more of the original code into our toolkit.

The latest toolset (v.0.37.0) working with Blender version 2.83.6 without error. But I wonder why the previous version (v0.36.1) of this toolset doesn't give any error in Blender 2.9.
I think as you mentioned, some tweaking needed for the toolset to work in Blender 2.9.

 

[Vitus]

The way I structured the toolkit is that I am still relying on the Khronos glTF2 exporter and I directly call functions of that original exporter in my scripts. When I need to add functionality, I fork only the required files into my project.
In order to make the emissiveFactor work, I had to modify a number of the Khronos Exporter scripts. It looks like one of them is calling a function from the gltf2_blender_utils.py script and it just so happens that the Blender 2.9 Khronos exporter dropped that file.

I'm actually not quite sure how to proceed from here. Either I branch off the toolkit - one for the LTS version, one for 2.9x, or I add the file in question to the toolkit, or I just import all of it to prevent problems in the future.

In the meantime use Blender 2.83.6 I guess...

 

[Devinci]

I just moved to Blender 2.9 from 3ds max. I don't have any issues when exporting except when I have animations in the model. But I still don't understand how to do those in Blender and the addon.

 

[Vitus]

I just moved to Blender 2.9 from 3ds max.

It's odd that it works for you in 2.9.

But I still don't understand how to do those in Blender and the addon.

The addon doesn't do anything about animations, other than exporting them according to the glTF2.0 standard. Oppose to FSX and P3D, for MSFS there is no sim-related animation data stored in the glTF file. Instead, you need to reference your animation's name in your behavior XML file to link it up with some flightsim action.
To animate something in Blender, you simply drop keyframes - same as in 3dsmax. It gets a bit more complicated when you want to animate a whole group of objects, for which you have to combine all those animations into one NLA - see my previous post about that.

 

[marcoh]

Notice though that metallic != reflective!
It's actually rather the Roughness map that controls how shine the surface is. The rougher the surface (more white), the more the light gets scattered. The Metallic value sets HOW the light gets reflected. You can see that in action when going through the different documents about material in the SDK.

Thank for the reply. i got it now.

I have another trouble, but i'm not sure it's a Blender exporter problem ou a compiler problem.

I've done à skyscraper with 2 level of LOD in Blender, and export in gltf. No problem.
But when i want to compile it, i got a error message "unable to read "myobject_LOD01.gltf" and the BGL is not compliled.

If i remove the gltf LOD01 and modify the XML to keep only the reference to the "myobject_LOD00.gltf", the compilator works, and generate the BGL.
I do it with command line in power shell, but inside the Simulator, it's same.
The xml generated by blender seem correct, except the number of visibility.

After cheking the document , i found nothing about LODs who can help me.

Do you have an idea ?

 

[Vitus]

I haven't really tested the batch LOD export in the field yet, so it might be that you're the first to really give this feature a proper shakedown. Does it work if you export the LOD groups manually?

 

[Devinci]

It's odd that it works for you in 2.9.

I made 3 objects a radar, antenna and a building. They're all showing in the sim and I had no error when I exported. I verified that I'm really on Blender 2.9 in Steam. Other than my AO maps being too dark from Substance Painter everything looked right. I even learned that it exported my default light from Blender.

 

[CaptainVTOL]

Afternoon all. Getting a Traceback error when trying to install the add-on. I understand this is usually caused by being on an old version of Blender. However, I'm on 2.9 and while this seems to have fixed it for some, my issue persists. Any recommendations?

Disregard, I see the posts now about folks having issues with 2.9. Reverted to 2.83 and the error went away.

 

[Devinci]

Afternoon all. Getting a Traceback error when trying to install the add-on. I understand this is usually caused by being on an old version of Blender. However, I'm on 2.9 and while this seems to have fixed it for some, my issue persists. Any recommendations?

View attachment 61862

Disregard, I see the posts now about folks having issues with 2.9. Reverted to 2.83 and the error went away.

There's nothing to install after you copy the folder MSFSToolkit into Blender\2.90\scripts\addons
You just enable it normally after restarting the software. I'm not having any issues on 2.9 otherwise

 

[wildkokiri27]

It won't work anymore in my blender installs (both 2.90 and 2.83.6)
I've installed it and used the addon just fine for a few hours, then the 0.37 released and I tried installing it I couldn't check the box to activate it, getting a huge error message:

Traceback (most recent call last):
File "C:\Program Files\Blender Foundation\Blender 2.90\2.90\scripts\modules\addon_utils.py", line 351, in enable
mod = __import__(module_name)
File "C:\Users\pablo\AppData\Roaming\Blender Foundation\Blender\2.90\scripts\addons\MSFSToolkit\__init__.py", line 50, in <module>
auto_load.init()
File "C:\Users\pablo\AppData\Roaming\Blender Foundation\Blender\2.90\scripts\addons\MSFSToolkit\auto_load.py", line 23, in init
modules = get_all_submodules(Path(__file__).parent)
File "C:\Users\pablo\AppData\Roaming\Blender Foundation\Blender\2.90\scripts\addons\MSFSToolkit\auto_load.py", line 51, in get_all_submodules
return list(iter_submodules(directory, directory.name))
File "C:\Users\pablo\AppData\Roaming\Blender Foundation\Blender\2.90\scripts\addons\MSFSToolkit\auto_load.py", line 55, in iter_submodules
yield importlib.import_module("." + name, package_name)
File "C:\Program Files\Blender Foundation\Blender 2.90\2.90\python\lib\importlib\__init__.py", line 127, in import_module
return _bootstrap._gcd_import(name[level:], package, level)
File "C:\Users\pablo\AppData\Roaming\Blender Foundation\Blender\2.90\scripts\addons\MSFSToolkit\exporter\exp\gltf2_blender_batch_gather.py", line 29, in <module>
from . import gltf2_blender_gather_nodes
File "C:\Users\pablo\AppData\Roaming\Blender Foundation\Blender\2.90\scripts\addons\MSFSToolkit\exporter\exp\gltf2_blender_gather_nodes.py", line 24, in <module>
from . import gltf2_blender_gather_mesh
File "C:\Users\pablo\AppData\Roaming\Blender Foundation\Blender\2.90\scripts\addons\MSFSToolkit\exporter\exp\gltf2_blender_gather_mesh.py", line 20, in <module>
from . import gltf2_blender_gather_primitives
File "C:\Users\pablo\AppData\Roaming\Blender Foundation\Blender\2.90\scripts\addons\MSFSToolkit\exporter\exp\gltf2_blender_gather_primitives.py", line 24, in <module>
from io_scene_gltf2.blender.exp import gltf2_blender_utils
ImportError: cannot import name 'gltf2_blender_utils' from 'io_scene_gltf2.blender.exp' (unknown location)

I've tried restarting the PC, uninstalling both Blender versions and reinstalling it (now I've just kept the latest one). Deleting the Blender Foundation folder on AppData and reinstalling the addon, but nothing seems to work. Any idea what is happening?

 

[wildkokiri27]

Disregard, I see the posts now about folks having issues with 2.9. Reverted to 2.83 and the error went away.

That's what I've done when I first got the error, but it came back when I was exporting a new model with textures.

 

[Vitus]

The thing is, if I simply add the missing file io_scene_gltf2.blender.exp/gltf2_belnder_utils.py into the toolkit, I fear that it might break something else. The Khronos Exporter is making use of cached functions and if as a result of me forking the old file there's now two versions of the same functions, it might create other issues down the line.

Curious though: Are you sure you're getting the same error when using 0.37.0 with Blender 2.83.6? That would be even more bewildering to me

 

[wildkokiri27]

Curious though: Are you sure you're getting the same error when using 0.37.0 with Blender 2.83.6? That would be even more bewildering to me

I've managed to fix it installing 2.83.6 again. But yeah, it happend with 2.83 as well. I was using 2.9 and I got the error there, so I went back to 2.83, worked for a time, then I got the same error. Anyway, if I get it again on 2.83.6 I'll leave a reply.

 

[mustang60348]

Found a problem OR I am doing something wrong.

No matter what I put in the texture dialogue box the GITF file never has the relative path anywhere in the file.

for example, If I put in ../texture/box the gitf file will have this

"textures" : [
{
"source" : 0
}
],
"images" : [
{
"mimeType" : "image/png",
"name" : "joe",
"uri" : "joe.png"
}
],

If I put nothing in the dialogue box, that doesn't change (and btw the compiler fails to find the texture in both instances.)

If I put in ../texture/joe in the dialogue box the gitf file doesn't change and again the compiler fails.

The exporter does put the textures in those locations but the gitf file doesn't point to the right location


And as a note, this works just fine in the 3dsmax exporter.

as another note, If I use the 'normal' .gitf exporter (not the msfs one) it does put in the relative path.