You wouldn't believe it.
So far there aren't any blender made planes here so far.
There guys are just that good

@PlaneFlightX
Fantastic.
Thanks :)

I've got SP Desktop and SP VR as well.
I might look into running it through the desktop version if I find something compelling. Great to know it can.

Yup, I'm just favouriting planes and then they show up in my available planes in VR :)

I just got done building an uber-simple (and clunky) F4U ( FrankenF4U )
And it just showed up in "my planes" in VR.
I wasn't expecting to even be able to fly it in VR as I've done zero cockpit modeling (other than having the required stock canopy)... but lo and behold... it worked.

I had to fly it with the thumbsticks of course, but again, this just demonstrates what I'm loving about this game.... it simply works. I'll make better. I'll make more detailed stuff and more accurate stuff... but this works.

I was just flying around in a plane that I just slapped together. That's awesome.
Again, Lego flying :)

@jimrooney I don't know much about the VR web browsing experience, as I only play on PC and just click enter VR in the level in the base game. It sounds like you've been downloading planes from your favorites (the same as downloading a random plane off the website in VR), which is fine. If they are modded planes, they won't show up in the VR web browser from my knowledge. You need to install mods to download and fly modded planes, which isn't possible in standalone VR. I have both PC SimplePlanes and SimplePlanes VR, and as a result it unlocks VR in the base game, meaning I don't even need to switch to SPVR. For me, it's like playing normal SP, and I just click a button and put on my VR headset when I want VR. So to sum up, unfortunately no.

I haven't changed my gravatar (btw that's its name) in years, but from what I remember you need to make an account on gravatar.com with the same email you used for your SP account (doing so also sets your gravatar on other websites that support it)

@PlaneFlightX
Interesting. Good to know.
I was able to pull "favourite" planes into VR... is that not possible if they're "modded" planes?

Also... how do you update your avatar here?
I looked in settings, but I didn't see anything.

Thanks!

Just something to note about modding, you mentioned that you also have VR on a Quest. Unfortunately modding is not supported in standalone VR (it's possible on PCVR with VR in the base game), so I'd strongly recommend trying to use the in-game designer first. In fact I build most of my stuff in-game to begin with, and use modding to reduce the part count.

@32
Absolutely!
I both love what people have done with it AND the intention and execution of it being "snap together" airplanes.

In my mind, I call it "Building and flying Lego planes".
The 12 year old in me is over the moon :)

The addition of their VR support pushed me over the edge. The game was a "good idea" before that, but the VR support knocks it out of the park.

Regular flight sims get very deep into making beautiful graphics and beautiful planes and have far more detail in areas that aren't super important to me. SimplePlanes on the other hand has all the right bits in all the right places. No frills but no gaps and their VR support follows the same ethos it seems... just clean and simple.

@HuskyDynamics01
That's actually great to hear. That tells me that the ingame tools are plenty capable as I've seen some pretty impressive results. In fact, I'd just assumed that they were using something like Blender because they were so well done.

I'll dig into the in game tools and see how we go.
But thanks for the great tutorial @PlaneFlightX
I'm not afraid of cracking open Unity if I need to. It'll just save me a lot of time if I don't have to.

Although I expect that I'll wind up in Unity eventually anyway for all the reasons you pointed out in your tutorial... the optimization alone is a compelling enough reason.

I was gonna say something, but planeflightx, beasthunter and huskydynamics pretty much summed it up. A lot of the stuff on the site looks inhumanly detailed but I guarantee that with good blueprints, reference photos, and a couple thousand hours of practice, you too can make some of the high-part creations that builders are putting out. Really, once you understand the basics of fuselage and maybe a bit of funky trees (SP's built-in programming language) you can start making pretty good builds with only a few hours of learning time. To be honest, this game was designed as a game where you could just snap blocks together and make stuff fly, but these days even the developers are being surprised at the level of detail people are putting into their creations.

I wish

Probably 99.999% of the planes you see on this site are built exclusively using the in-game tools and part selection. There's a few that aren't (using the methods that @PlaneFlightX and @BeastHunter listed), but the overwhelming majority of planes are exclusively made using the in-game builder. It's not the most intuitive system, but it can be pushed really far.

And just an fyi in the future, press the reply button to tag people when you reply, that way they can see that you've replied to them.

Awesome.
Thanks.
I'll give them a whirl in a bit.

I do like the Simple planes modeller and I'm curious how far I'll push it. I've got some stuff I've built in things like gravity sketch that I'm keen to pull in if I can.

In SimplePlanes, users build planes from a large variety of parts, and can optionally use the game's built-in coding language Funky Trees to program some of these parts. There are two ways to directly solve the problem "get a 3D model to appear in SimplePlanes". One is to use the mod @BeastHunter linked below, and the other is to mod the game. I've made a tutorial on how to add 3D models to the game.

This is the only mod I can think of for that, but you would still need to manually add a flight model for the planes. And all of the planes are actually modeled in game, don’t ask me how they do that.