Blender or what

[Panic]

What do you use to model aircraft?

[Goran_M]

Any 3D modeling software is good enough to model aircraft for X Plane. Take the time to learn it and understand there are no shortcuts.

[Kaphias]

Personally I find blenders a little hard to use when making aircraft... none of the buttons have anything to do with aircraft, and every time I throw all the right parts in it, it just ends up breaking the blender. Someone made a great set of tutorials, but they were for some computer program, not my blender!

I don't know why anyone would use blender. I find that fabric-covered tube steel makes a much better airplane that my blender.

[guym-p]

Blender and AC3D are the most popular. They have the advantage of support (via plugins) to import and export X-Plane files.

Of the two, Blender is the most complex and sophisticated, and it's free. The snag with Blender is the interface, which is unlike anything else, therefore the learning curve is steeper than others. Well worth it, though.

AC3D has a less-polished interface than Blender, but it works very well indeed. It's one of those programs that seems light on features, and yet when you start using it you realise it has exactly what you need: no more, no less. The X-Plane plugin is by Ben Supnik, and allows you to set up and preview X-Plane animations with slider controls.

I use both: Blender has a much larger feature set. However, I prefer the workflow in AC3D from model to object, so I use AC3D most of the time, and Blender for special operations — e.g. rendering to texture. It is an extremely personal choice, though, and I have as many friends who prefer to use Blender throughout.

[ilias.tselios]

About 2 years ago, I downloaded blender (as free, a good option) but since I had no idea of 3D programs use, it let it aside. Then 1 year ago i fell on Dan Klaue's tutorials. I tried a bit, then I found the CGCookie website with nice tutorials, and I started doing a few things. Now I can use blender quite well, and although many say that is a hard to use program, now I think that is not that hard at all. I don't know for any more advanced programs than blender, but I think it's very powerful and If you give it a shot, is getting easier day by day. At the end, I believe that you can use any 3D program to do your job depending on how you feel it. For me, blender's keyboard shortcuts work very nice!

[guym-p]

I agree: Blender isn't hard, but you have to get some hours under your belt before it "clicks".

[tkyler]

It doesn't matter what 3D software you use, you most likely will have to go THROUGH Blender or AC3D in order to export to X-Plane OBJ formats. Blender is more lengthy to learn, but more powerfule than AC3D...and once learned, very fast indeed. The frustration factor when learning Blender is high....but I can not tell you how many people I've helped with Blender over the years say..."Oh that's cool" when shown how to get something done. Whichever you choose depends as much as whether or not you can get past the interface...and then followed by the complexity of what you want to build. The more complex the project, the advantage tips in Blenders favor due to scene mangement tools, better UV tools and rendering-baking features. I have never seen anyone who has gotten over the Blender learning curve from AC3D ever go back to AC3D. I'm still on 2.49b and consider it the pinnacle of 3D software for x-plane development. Proven, stable, full-featured, well supported, predictable, full of every feature I need to support my workflow. It's like a pencil, shovel or keyboard....it just works for the job at hand.

Tom Kyler

Laminar/IXEG