Physical Based Rendering (PBR) lighting - alternatives

[ErichB 3,638]

So with the rumour mill stirring and starting to bubble, the rumour says that LM have opted for a new lighting engine in P3dV4 which is an 'alternative' to physical based rendering - apparently it will 'surprise' us.  (Okay, whatever..)

 

Does anyone want to comment on what the plausible alternatives might be - and if possible shed light on what it might look like.  (pun totally intended)

[scottb613 1,188]

Hi Folks,

 

Yeah - please let it have light sources that actually lights the objects it touches - no more painting pools of light on ground textures - or aircraft sitting under a light pole that is not lit by said pole... That would be a HUGE improvement for me - right up their with ATC that actually provides traffic separation services...

 

Regards,

Scott

[pmb 5,137]

Honestly, after (hopefully) removing that ugly sharp autogen boundary and LOD restriction when going 64 bits, I would first of all like them to rip off all runway and navigation data from the bgls into an updateable database and repair the wrong elevation data.

 

Kind regards.

[Silverbird 115]

Hey guys didn't want to start a new thread was just thinking today what was the reason for Lockheed not being able to use Physical Based Rendering ? on P3d V4?

[vbazillio 2,226]

Any enhancement in Prepar3D is a good news. I 'm still remembered the time where we were stuck with no-more-developped FSx. Though I'm not convince, the lightning system is in my top 15 priority ;)

[Silverbird 115]

1 hour ago, vbazillio said:

Any enhancement in Prepar3D is a good news. I 'm still remembered the time where we were stuck with no-more-developped FSx. Though I'm not convince, the lightning system is in my top 15 priority ;)

Hi Vincent I totally agree its crazy how far we have come...I remember when fsx was a dead end when aces closed, I do love the dynamic lighting just wondering why pbr wasn't used for p3d.

[simbol 5,819]

On 17/02/2017 at 11:48 AM, ErichB said:

So with the rumour mill stirring and starting to bubble, the rumour says that LM have opted for a new lighting engine in P3dV4 which is an 'alternative' to physical based rendering - apparently it will 'surprise' us.  (Okay, whatever..)

 

Does anyone want to comment on what the plausible alternatives might be - and if possible shed light on what it might look like.  (pun totally intended)

Do you mean V5?

Simbol 

[simbol 5,819]

18 minutes ago, Silverbird said:

 I do love the dynamic lighting just wondering why pbr wasn't used for p3d.

Well have you Google information about PBR? If you do you will realise that every single texture for every single add-on / airplane will need to be changed.

That is not an easy task, it will also require much better video cards and hardware for most of the user base.

You cannot change platforms so drastically, 64bits by itself was a huge change.

Best Regards 

Simbol 

[Silverbird 115]

10 minutes ago, simbol said:

Well have you Google information about PBR? If you do you will realise that every single texture for every single add-on / airplane will need to be changed.

That is not an easy task, it will also require much better video cards and hardware for most of the user base.

You cannot change platforms so drastically, 64bits by itself was a huge change.

Best Regards 

Simbol 

Hi simbol yes I have checked  I was just wondering since xp-11 for example has that feature and also Flight Sim World, as far as I know the dev team never answered that question. hopefully dynamic lighting gets better.

[simbol 5,819]

4 minutes ago, Silverbird said:

Hi simbol yes I have checked  I was just wondering since xp-11 for example has that feature and also Flight Sim World, as far as I know the dev team never answered that question. hopefully dynamic lighting gets better.

They were developed with PBR in mind from the beginning, in the other hand the ESP engine (FSX, P3D) didn't.

But this is the reason why P3D was so successful as many FSX add-on's and utilities were very easy to convert to P3D.

Simbol 

[NorwegianAviator 60]

While nice graphics and lighting is very welcome, I really hope that LM fixes the major flaws in simulation before they start focusing on the graphics and lighting engine.

[vortex681 806]

3 hours ago, simbol said:

They were developed with PBR in mind from the beginning, in the other hand the ESP engine (FSX, P3D) didn't.

I don't think that's a valid statement for Flight Sim World. It uses the same base sim as P3D and PBR is being added to it, post release, in phases so it's difficult to understand why the same couldn't be done for P3D.

[ErichB 3,638]

19 hours ago, JanReidar said:

I really hope that LM fixes the major flaws in simulation

That depends what you mean by 'major flaws'.

Just seen your other post - agree.   I hope they get to fixing some of those issues inherently too as they have been around forever,.

[simbol 5,819]

20 hours ago, vortex681 said:

I don't think that's a valid statement for Flight Sim World. It uses the same base sim as P3D and PBR is being added to it, post release, in phases so it's difficult to understand why the same couldn't be done for P3D.

Physically based rendering or PBR was introduced to X-Plane very slowly until it was fully implemented for X-PLANE 11 (released on 30 March 2017) when the feature changed to be always enabled, X-Plane 10 (where PBR was available as an experimental option) was released in 2011, it doesn't share the same simulation base of FSX / P3D, they are entirely different products and simulation engines.

The ESP Engine (FSX, P3D) was never designed to handle this kind of rendering as it uses Bitmaps and alpha texture to represent light, bear in mind the P3D is based on the ESP engine from FSX SP2 (released back in October 2007), Lockheed Martin bought the ESP rights back in 2009 but the ESP engine is much older than this!.

LM has been updating the ESP engine slowly over time, the first major changes LM did to the original ESP base engine was to convert it to 64bit and implement Dynamic Lighting, which as a result triggered a whole bunch of add-on's to be re-developed and updated as you all experienced very recently.

If LM implements PBR today all your add-on's will stop working intermediately as it requires all content providers to "redevelop" their objects and textures, 3D objects would need to be redrawn on 3Ds Max to apply the PBR textures rendering materials and also being recompiled for the simulator, I imagine the current .BGL format would be incompatible or inefficient and therefor a new format of compiled objects would be required, the implications of this are huge!, so this is not something that LM would take slightly as it required the coordination with all 3rd party developers in order to minimise the impact and ensure the flying community takes the changes in the best positive way.

Best Regards,
Simbol

[Bloody 2]

Hi, are there any sources for these rumours?