Howto:Work with AC3D files in Blender

Many FlightGear aircraft modelers prefer Blender as their 3D-modelling editor. FlightGear primarily uses the AC3D file format (.ac) to model aircraft, scenery models, and many other things. There is good support for the import and export of the AC3D file format from Blender. This page gives an overview of those options.

Blender versions 2.4 and older

For these versions, Blender supports both the import and export of AC3D files out of the box. Just go into user preferences and enable the addon scripts.

Blender versions 2.5 to 2.62

For these versions you can use one of these scripts by Majic79:

• Version for Blender 2.59 (repository) (ZIP file download).
• Version for Blender 2.60 (repository) (ZIP file download).
• Version for Blender 2.62 (repository) (ZIP file download).

Blender versions 2.63 and later

For version 2.63 onwards you have a choice of several scripts.

Majic79 addon

Current maintainer: User:Necolatis

Tested with Blender version 2.63 to 2.76

Notes:

• Before you export a model with this addon, make sure that you set the UV map and texture inside the material, not just inside the UV editor. See the video tutorial here.
• Inside Blender when you want to see the textures, be sure to set the shader to GLSL (or for 2.7 just set view mode to materials). Alternatively set textured solid in solid view.
• To see textured surfaces as they will be shown in Flightgear, go into the material texture and set the blend type to "Multiply" instead of the default "Mix" (the importer will also do this automatically). An example plane that will look very different if this is not done is the FGAddon aircraft ASK-13, notice the wingtips.
• If you wonder where to put the scripts you could open blender's user preferences (CTRL ALT U, or File->User Preferences) tick e.g. Import/Export and extent the informations concerning an existing script. Usually this throws the path. For Ubuntu 14.04LTS/Blender 2.79b e.g. it's: /usr/share/blender/scripts/addons/.
• Be aware of the selection "Mirror color to emis/ambi" usually emissive/ambient 1.0 does produce pale results. Hotfix: Adjust mirrorcolor as ambient, choose mirror color->ambient in filter.

You can report bugs with the addon here, but please include problematic .ac/.blend files and their textures.

Repository (ZIP file download).

Notice that the above link is to Necolatis (Nikolai) latest version, as the Majic79 github hasn't kept up with the updates and seems dead.

Mr. No addon

Notes:

• When exporting with this addon, make sure you set the texture inside the UV editor.
• When using this script, it is very important that everything is textured. The addon will silently fail if this is not the case.
• This script does not work reliable when nested groups are being used in the imported AC3D model (example here).

Download link (MediaFire)

External links

AC3D file format