Aircraft external shadows

[endl3ss 3]

Hi,

I'm sorry if this has been covered before, but I tried a search for my "peculiar" issue, without finding anything similar.

Short and sweet...my aircrafts get weird shadows in external views. Often it looks like a smaller version of the actual aircraft. Running FSX-SE.
A couple of screenshots:

Virtavia's B-1B is especially bad

MilViz F-4E Phantom II is not too rough, but still some weird flickering across the fuselage at times.

 

I've unchecked Toned Shadows, as I picked up a comment about that from another post, but while it did seem to help a bit on the F-4E, it did nothing for the B-1B. All I can say is that these shadows popped up when I enabled DX10 for FSX-SE.
So I'm wondering if there's something else that can/should be done here.

Finally I have another issue, which also came along with DX10. It might be an issue with the aircraft models, but I just wanted to check with people more knowledgable than me, if this is something that has been seen before, and if there is a fix for it.
The issue is that the cockpit lighting sometimes bleeds through the fuselage. 
I see it on several aircrafts, but since I've been flying the MilViz F-100 a lot lately, I only have a screenshot of that right now. The lights I'm talking about can be seen at the front of the windscreen. Not too bad in this picture, but can be more prominent at other angles. The lights shine through also from six o'clock low, for example.

So, any ideas?

[SteveFx 258]

As a new user can you provide a name or orderid please?

In all cases like this - save a flight. 

Take a screen shot in Dx10 with the fixer, uninstall the libraries take a screenshot in native Dx10 preview then switch to DX9 and take a screen shot which you can do with the button in the controller.  

Then switch back to Dx10 and reinstall the libraries.

Also please provide info on what camera is used - I cannot tell if those are spot view or  tower view zoomed  - the way the  terrain look sin the first picture suggests that that is tower view, the third picture would have to be spot view I think.

 

 

[endl3ss 3]

Hi,

 

Order ID is: STE170320-6675-44216
Name: Olav Gundersen

All three screenshots are with Flyby camera, zoomed in a bit.

I'm gonna do a test here according to your directions, and get back with some screenshots 

 

[SteveFx 258]

The B1B is a legacy model without external shadows in fsx.  

You have I think therefore enabled shadows in the fixer in the legacy settings with both legacy options.  If you use the diagnostics button there will be many warnings of side effects.   As far as I can tell external shadows then appear reasonably well in spot view - there is the occasional glitch as you pan around which is common with forced legacy shadows.

The particular issue that you have is I think with high levels of zoom in the flyby camera. There is an issue in fsx where at high zooms the shadow depths become compressed and thus inaccurate.  This can easily be seen in tower view when zooming to 50x will show very poor shadows on any aircraft in dx9/dx10.  I think that is what you were seeing here.  Whilst there was once a  flaw in toned shadows -  that was fixed years ago.

Light bleed is just a flaw.  Lights illuminate any surface within a distance from the light and this takes no account of any occlusion. 

 

[SteveFx 258]

 

Update:   testing more I can see the same issue with the flyby camera zoomed in DX9, DX10 preview with and without the fixer  even with default aircraft such as the such as the Beechcraft Baron.

[endl3ss 3]

Hi again!

Been doing a bit of testing here too.
I'm a bit stumped, I'm seeing the exact same things as you, of course. I can't even begin to wonder why I became aware of the shadow issues after enabling DX10, and not seeing it previously in DX9; maybe I just stopped worrying about VAS and OOMs after DX10, and decided to do more flyby-views...  

In any case, both on the B-1B and the F-4E whether it's DX10 with libraries, native DX10 or DX9, makes absolutely NO difference whatsoever., and they both appear similar in all views.
Spot and locked spot are fairly similar, as you say there's some gltiching like shadows where there really shouldn't be any, when I pan around.
Zoomed-in (and not so zoomed-in) flyby's and Nearest Tower view is where it becomes evident that something is weird. Both aircraft. And all DX-varieties, makes no difference.

F-100 Light bleed-through appears for me just in the zoomed-in flyby and tower views, not spot or locked spot. Not really very bothered by it, tbh.

6 hours ago, SteveFx said:

The particular issue that you have is I think with high levels of zoom in the flyby camera. There is an issue in fsx where at high zooms the shadow depths become compressed and thus inaccurate.  This can easily be seen in tower view when zooming to 50x will show very poor shadows on any aircraft in dx9/dx10.  I think that is what you were seeing here.  Whilst there was once a  flaw in toned shadows -  that was fixed years ago.

This is my conclusion too, and the exact problem I have. Definitely NOT DX10, nor DX Fixer related, it is there no matter what.
 

At the end of the day then, this turned out to be less of a DX10-issue and more of a FSX-issue (and an observational ability issue for myself) 
But apart from that, do you happen to know whether that FSX-issue is fixable somehow?

[SteveFx 258]

Sadly I really don't think it can be fixed (without access to the core code)  looking at what is going wrong the shadowmap looks to me to be drawn from the wrong direction which then makes the shadows wrong in the rendering pass. 

[endl3ss 3]

19 minutes ago, SteveFx said:

Sadly I really don't think it can be fixed (without access to the core code)  looking at what is going wrong the shadowmap looks to me to be drawn from the wrong direction which then makes the shadows wrong in the rendering pass. 

Yeah, it definitely looks that way, with regards to shadow direction. It is VERY apparent in the screenshot below:

In the screenshot, the sun is once again behind the camera, so the shadowing is all wrong. 

Anyways, thanks for your help, Steve, even if it didn't solve my problem 
...apart from convincing me to maybe getting my eyes checked in the future...

 

[Steven Silva 27]

i have this problem with PMDG 747 v3 and PMDG 777 

[SteveFx 258]

sorry but its a bug in FSX with these cameras