X-Plane v8 Aircraft models to ac3d

[johnguk]

Hi, Newbie question, please treat me gently:

Is it possible to load X-plane v8 .acf files into ac3d?

I have downloaded acftools. Do I need a v8 .def file to allow acftools to convert the v8 files?

My extracted .ac files only have material definitions, 0 vertices/polygons.

I'm running AC33 5.0.21.

Any help/links etc would be gratefully received. Thanks.

[KenK]

You cant open the .acf files as far as I am aware. What you want to do is open up that aircraft model in Plane Maker and go to the "Special" menu. At the bottom of that menu is a "Generate OBJ from Aircraft" option. Select that and it will save the file as "aircraft.obj" in your ROOT directory. I have no idea why the heck it saves it there of all places, but thats where it sticks it on my Mac running XP v8.40. (On a PC it might stick it in C:\, you'll just have to look around for it). You can open the OBJ files up in AC3D if you have the XPlane OBJ Support plug-in installed. It's available here:

http://scenery.x-plane.com/tools.php

Be sure and follow the instructions that com with the plug-in! It's not as simple as dropping the file into the plugins folder! You have to remove the old OBJ plug-in as it is not compatible with XPlane.

I hope this helps. This has been as far as I've gone. I havent saved any changes and brought them back into XP yet.

[johnguk]

Thanks for the advice.

I managed to do it an alternative way (all in XP):

I downloaded Blender (http://www.blender.org) and an .acf file importer plugin
(http://marginal.org.uk/x-planescenery/tools.html, Xplane2Blender).

Then exported to .ac format ( Blender understands .ac in the standard distribution)

This worked well.

Again, thanks for the help.