Hi all
I find that at some angles the underwing shadows are very faint or none existent on polished metal aircraft , whereas the same view on a painted body will produce a shadow, so I can have the situation where the painted area of a fuselage will be shaded whilst the metal not ! I have noticed other metal aircraft suffer the same .
Is there a way to keep the shadows , other than have a none polished aircraft ?
The screenshot shows this best.
The albedo, AO and normal maps are the same in all shots.
The shadow options are checked and set at very high quality.
HDR lighting on and dynamic reflections on set low .
thanks
Dave R
Rob Ainscough wrote: ↑Thu Jul 11, 2019 4:14 pm
Hi Dave,
What happens when you set DR = Off and DR = Max ... any difference?
Cheers, Rob.
Hi Rob
With DR off I get a very shiny finish ( using checkbox for global reflection on/true )
DR medium and max causes the textures to flash if on the ground or very low altitude
DR settings have no effect on the shadow though.
Dave
OK here are the params: HDR off, DR on 'high', shadows on. PBR fuse materials created via ModelConverterX, other materials still FSX. Albedo and Normal (bump) texture size 2048, Metallic texture 1024 only, Red (metallic) channel white (full strength), Green and Blue channels passive (white and black respectively), Alpha (smooth) blotchy mid-grey.
As you can see, the tailplane does cast a shadow in the present environment and light angle, but that is the absolute exception, in most other conditions there is no shadow or just the faintest hint of it, supporting Harley's findings, above.
In other respects it doesn't look too bad, except with the metallic alpha (smoothness) at 50% the dynamic reflection remains fuzzy and indeed hardly noticeable at all. Of course, pushing smoothness up to 100% gets you full and sharp reflections, but then the spread of the highlights gets extremely narrow, and the rest of the fuse gets awfully dark. IOW, doesn't look good at all.
My question, is it even possible, given the present V 4.5 PBR setup, to render a plausible looking polished metal, including shadows and sharpish reflections and if so, does anyone have the recipe for it?
Alternatively, may I put this on the wishlist: give the developer better control over the spread of the highlights and the amount and sharpness of reflection.
Many thanks, Rob, for looking at this, appreciate it.
I only have Max 2011 and it's no longer supported, or so I understand. What I do is, I create an FSX mdl and run it through ModelConverterX (MCX). MCX has a powerful material editor that allows us to switch over to and assign PBR materials and parameters, and we can then recompile the mdl to V 4.5 standard. Actually, the C-47 is still gmax, but the identical procedure applies.
HDR is off on my setup because I got nasty artefacts (mainly bloom) when viewing the plane from afar and at height. I'll be happy to give it another try though. I noticed OP Dave (sorry for the earlier misnomer) has HDR on.
Could make a test version of the Dak available, if anyone is interested.
