Howto:Work with AC3D files in Blender

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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:

Blender versions 2.63 and later

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

Majic79 addon

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).
  • When exporting/importing, this addon will tessellate This is a link to a Wikipedia article the meshes into quads/triangles.

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

Repository (ZIP file download).

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