Introduction¶
Objects are three-dimensional things which can be placed & moved within the X-Plane environment. They can be:
Buildings, flags, trashcans, and other 3D objects displayed as part of X-Plane scenery
Detailed rendering (e.g., rivets, guy-wires, windshields) and moving parts of aircraft (e.g., canopy, parking break, landing gear) and their 3D cockpit (e.g., displays, G1000 knobs, switches).
Objects which can be placed and manipulated by plugins (e.g., deer, ships)
Yet, objects are just the things. You separately need to load and display them in order to see them in X-Plane. When you’re ready, see Adding Objects to Sim.
But first, you have to create your objects, see Creating Objects.
An X-Plane Object is a singular thing described by and wholly contained within a single X-Plane *.obj file.
The file itself may contain any number of 3D geometric objects, that is, any number of extruded and sliced
cubes, cylinders, cones, etc. For example, the single X-Plane Object for the Boeing 737-800 nose gear in
the file 738nosegear.obj, contains 16 geometric objects (sets of triangles).
Typically, a 3D modelling tool such as Blender is used to create geometric objects to compose the X-Plane object. The modelled object is then converted from native to X-Plane specific format (“OBJ8”), where it is read and interpreted by the X-Plane simulator.
Some of the magic / complexity of X-Plane OBJ8 format relates to how the object is represented within the X-Plane environment. This includes material (e.g., transparency) shadows, level-of-detail, animation and manipulation through datarefs. Some of this complexity can be added (and converted) within Blender, some complexity requires directly editing the converted OBJ file.
We’ll cover:
About this documentation¶
Note
This is a work in progress, and may never get completed. I’m using this as an experiment to see if this method of documentation is useful.
Targetted for X-Plane 12
This is based off of Laminar Research X-Plane Documentation. Much of the text is extracted from their public and copyrighted documentation.
Comments and observations are collected from public forums (largely X-Plane.org), private emails, and conversions with other developers. We’ll try to properly credit exceptional examples and insights.
We’ll (also) explicitly link to other useful references / videos which are owned and maintained separately from this reference.
We’ll use XPPython3 examples when referencing code.
Change Log lists current and previous documentation versions.
