X-Plane 11 livery creation with Blender

Foreword
After having done a bit of research on a typical livery creation process for X-Plane, i had
noticed that virtually none of tutorials I stumbled upon incorporates actual 3D modelling
software into the worflow to help visualise the edits being made to the texture. Having to paint
directly on the image in a graphics editing program (often without a UV map reference layer),
saving the texture and reloading the model in Plane Maker every once in a while is not an
approach i'd be able to put up with myself, especially knowing that there are much better ways
to do it. This is basically what sparked the idea of writing up this tutorial, which will focus on
painting the livery in Blender.

1. Software we're going to be using

This tutorial assumes you are using a Windows machine and have the following programs set
up:

·1 AC3D (http://www.inivis.com/downloads.html) with X-Plane OBJ import/export

plugin (http://www.inivis.com/forum/showthread.php?t=7032)

·2 Blender 2.77 or newer https://blender.org)

·3 Krita 3.3.2 or newer (https://krita.org/en/download/krita-desktop/)

·4 XPTools (https://developer.x-plane.com/tools/xptools/)

I'm also assuming you have some basic proficiency at using Blender and navigating through
its UI. You can follow the general workflow idea of this tutorial with a different set of tools (3ds
Max/Maya in place of Blender, Photoshop instead of Krita etc), but i cannot guarantee you'll be
able to achieve the same results, as it won't translate 1:1 in such case. The aircraft used in my
example is the default Cessna 172 Skyhawk.

2. Importing the aircraft model

You need to import the model you'll be painting into Blender first. Since there's no reliable
Blender addon capable of achieving this (i have tried
https://github.com/daveprue/XPlaneImport, but it's a total hit&miss case, with a strong lean
towards the latter, sadly), we're going to use another program as an intermediary step, to load
the objects and export them to plain Wavefront OBJ file, readable directly by Blender.

Side note: It should be possible to export to Wavefront OBJ directly from Plane Maker, but for whaveter reason it has never
worked for me, creating invalid files. If you happen to know about better methods to deal with importing planes into Blender, don't
hesitate to let me know.
 Install AC3D and X-Plane import/export plugin and run the program. Hit CTRL+I, and navigate
to the objects subfolder inside the main directory of your aircraft. Depending on the plane, there
will be varying number of OBJ files, since X-Plane aircraft models come in segmented fashion.
Import all of of them, one after another. After this is done, select Export from the File menu, and
pick Wavefront OBJ (.obj) ... from the list to export the model. Pick some temporary work
directory you'll be keeping all the files in and save it there. Now we're ready to move on to
Blender. Start it and import the OBJ file created by AC3D.

3. Setting up the scene and materials

Now you'll usually want to hide some parts of the model, like glass elements of the windows
(and in case of this specific example, also water floats, since default C172 comes with two
landing gear types, and we're going to work on each one separately to avoid clutter in the
scene). Select all elements you want to hide and press H.

You might want to join (CTRL+J) remaining objects into one mesh, to make the painting
easier (so you won't be needing to switch between active elements constantly when crossing
their borders with your brush). The important thing to note here is that you SHOULD NOT join
things that don't share the same texture and UV map - usually wing parts and fuselage - UVs are
merged as well, which would result in a huge mess of unrelated UV maps mangled together.

After you're done with this, you can move on to setting up the materials. If your object has
more than one material assigned to it, you can remove the excessive ones, since we only need
one per object:

In my case, the stray yellow one was a result of me mistakingly joining the windows with the
fuselage.

4. Node setup
This is where the vital part comes - planning your material node connections to suit your
needs. Nodes are a vast topic on its own, and there's no such thing like the one and only valid
setup. Covering the basics of nodes is out of the scope of this tutorial, and it's assumed you're
already reasonably comfortable with them. I'm going to jump straight into an example
configuration I work with myself.

We're going to set up multiple paint layers, so we'll be able to work on various elements of
our livery (separate stripes, etc) independently, much like in Photoshop/GIMP/Corel/[Insert any
competent graphic software here]

First things first, ensure your active renderer is Cycles Render. In UV Editing view open the
stock, full white texture that comes with the aircraft (fuselage.dds). Blender reads DDS images
by default, so there's no need to convert them beforhand. Next, create as many new, empty
textures with 0 alpha (full transparency) as many layers you want to work on (you can add more
anytime later as you see fit). Ensure they're the same size as the base stock texture (4096px in
our case).

Enter the Node Editor view, switch it to Shader tree mode and add Image Texture nodes for
each layer (including the base texture). In my case, i needed 4 nodes (original texture, 2 layers
for stripes, and one layer for Kumiko). Now you need to add mixing and RGB nodes and connect
everything together in a meaningful way. My example setup looks like this (zoom in to see the
details):

The idea behind it is to have the paint layers work as controllers for alpha transparency of
single RGB color rather than mixing their contents directly into the final texture (except for the
anime character, since we want it to retain all of its colors).
 Let me go through the whole setup, node by node, and explain it. Starting from the right
hand side, we have the output, and a basic Diffuse shader, which is pretty self-explanatory. Next
is the Mix node, in multiply mode, because we want to blend the base texture and our stripes in
such a way that the details and shading of the former are preserved and visible through our
paint layers. Its inputs are connected to the base texture and to the output of last mixer stage of
the color components for our paint layers. Alpha blending between both is controlled by the sum
of all alpha channels of our paint layers.

Moving to the left, we have our 3 custom layers mixed consecutively one after another (the
topmost one being the rightmost node, and the bottom one being the leftmost). First is our
Kumiko layer, whose color output is mixed directly with the lower layer, and its alpha affecting
the the mixing amount. The alpha also contributes to the sum of all alpha channels (Add nodes
at the bottom) which controls the blending of the final mixture with the background.

Next, are the two layers we'll use to paint the stripes on. We aren't going to be painting
directly with the target color we want, instead we'll use white brush strokes and the resulting
image will only serve as a transparency controller for the RGB node. This way we also get the
luxury of being able to change the colours of the whole livery as we please by just picking a new
value in said node.

Important note: you need to create separate node setups and separate sets of empty textures
for objects that use different UV maps and base textures (fuselage and wings in our example)

5. Painting the livery

Now that everything is prepared and ready, we can start painting the actual livery. Get back
to 3D viewport, swith the display mode to Material, select the object you want to paint on, in
this case the fuselage, and switch the editing mode to Texture Paint

On the left-hand side toolbar, in the Slots tab, there should be all of our textures listed (this
is synchronised with what we have set up in node editor). Here you select the desired layer you
want to paint on. You can also set up your view to show both the 3D model and the UV editor
inside the same window for better overview of your work and to be able to alternate between
them easily, but that's a matter of your own taste.
 You can now switch to the Tools tab and tweak the brush settings to your liking. One
important thing you might really want to enable ASAP is the X axis symmetry, which saves you
the pain of doing the same thing twice for both sides of the vehicle.

First layer, i'm gonna focus on is the layer contaning our Kumiko. We'll use the stencil brush
mode which lets you draw a preloaded picture onto the object. For convenience, switch to the
ortographic view, and place the camera perpedicularly to the tail surface. Then, expand the
Texture drop-down menu in brush's properties tab, switch the mapping mode to Stencil and add
a new brush texture.

To load a new file into it, go to the Textures tab in Blender's main properties panel, on the
right, and select the newly created brush texture slot. Now, in the Image drop down menu, you
can pick any file from your disk to use as stencil. Ideally the file should contain an alpha channel,
with transparency around the object of our interest. That's something should take care for
before importing it.

Now whenever you place your cursor in the 3D viewport, the semi-transparent stencil image
will appear. You can drag it around with RMB and resize to your liking, by holding Shift+RMB and
dragging the mouse around. When you're happy with its position, start painting with LMB, as
usual. This way you can put any image onto your model very quickly and effectively without
having to worry about manually fitting it onto the UV map. After you're done with it, and want to
go back to a normal brush, just click the X button in the brush Texture menu, in the left-hand
toolbar.

Now is the time to show some love to the remaining layers, on which we're going to draw
the stripes. Switch the active painting slot to one of them, and paint whatever you can come up
with, using white brush color, as the node setup takes care to apply whaveter color you have
selected in your RGB nodes. Play with brush settings to tweak it to your current needs as you
paint.

Important note: To erase the paint, switch the Blend mode from Mix to Erase Alpha (since, as
you should remember and keep in mind, the alpha value of our painting layer is what controls
the visibility of the colour solely)
 You can use different stroke modes, among which Line, Space and Curve are the most useful
ones in most cases. Press E in paint mode to quickly access the brush stroke selector.

For outlining your stripes, Curve stroke is the best pick. you can place the camera at any angle
you want and draw the curve by holding CTRL+LBM. Confirm the stroke with Enter. You don't
need to be in ortographic view, although i find it most usable, personally.

When you're happy with the results of your work you can move on to the wings, by switching
the editing mode back to Object mode, selecting the wings, and, returning back to Texture Paint
mode. Don't forget you can paint in 2D views too, which is especially handy for making precise
corrections.

6. Assembling layers into the final texture

After you're done with the livery work, it's time to assemble all layers into a single texture,
ready to use in the simulator. While in theory you should be able to bake them onto a single
image directly in Blender, I haven't had much success in doing so myself (probably because I'm
still pretty much a noob at this task), therefore we're gonna accomplish this in external editor,
such as Krita. Save every paint layer as PNG with transparency to your working folder. You might
also want to save the original textures as PNGs too, if your graphics editor doesn't support
loading DDS directly (which is the case for Krita).
 Import all your fuselage layers into Krita and place them in the right top-down order. Then
colorize the white ones with the same color as the one you used in Blender, by locking their
transparency and painting over them with brush (you can look up the RGB values in the RGB
nodes if you want the exact same colours).

Finally, merge them into one and switch the blending mode to Multiply to achieve the same
effect as we did in Blender thanks to our nodes. Save the resulting texture, be sure to name it
the same way as the original base texture, except for the extension, which should be set to PNG.
Repeat the whole process for the wing layers.

Lastly, convert both fuselage and wing textures into .DDS by dragging the files directly from
Explorer onto the XGrinder window (which is the GUI part of XPTools suite). You can skip the last
step and export DDS directly if you're using an editor that supports it like GIMP or Photoshop
instead of Krita. Now you can test your work in X-Plane, and that's it!

2018 Midori Mizuno Licensed under Attribution-ShareAlike 2.5 Generic (CC BY-SA 2.5)