June 8, 20178 yr Im hoping somebody can/will tell me if they know the answer to this. I've made changes to cloud puff pngs in my experiments and it seems that there is a ring of clouds that exists between where the cloudpuffs4 and cloudpuffs5 clouds exist. if you know where these clouds come from, help would be appreciated. thanks in advance. Ill delete/change more files in the meantime. | Dave | I've been around for most of my life. There's always a sunset happening somewhere in the world that somebody is enjoying.
June 8, 20178 yr 19 minutes ago, sightseer said: I've made changes to cloud puff pngs in my experiments and it seems that there is a ring of clouds that exists between where the cloudpuffs4 and cloudpuffs5 clouds exist. if you know where these clouds come from, help would be appreciated. Apparently there's nothing like that. I painted cloud_puff4.png solid red and cloud_puff5.png solid green, and here are the results: "Society has become so fake that the truth actually bothers people".
June 8, 20178 yr Author hmmm...that's odd. I made cloudpuffs4 equal to 3 and then made puffs5 non existent (black alpha) and where you have green, I have clouds that don't seem to come from anywhere. im using a manually configured broken cumulus from approx. 7000 to 14k feet with mild precip and storminess. I'll delete clouds 4 and see what I get. thanks Murmur. | Dave | I've been around for most of my life. There's always a sunset happening somewhere in the world that somebody is enjoying.
June 8, 20178 yr X-Plane blends the different layers at the border between them, so maybe some cloud_puff4.png textures are still visible where cloud_puff5.png would have shown if there were a visible texture. The blending can be modified with some dataref (I don't remember the name right now). In any case, if your goal is to delete the last cloud layer (cloud_puff5.png), it's not necessary to make an invisible texture. Just change the dataref called "clouds/last_res_3d" (or something like that) from "5" to "4". You'll also have better performance (if the cloud drawing is the bottleneck). "Society has become so fake that the truth actually bothers people".
June 8, 20178 yr Author Well I don't mess with datarefs yet...Im not that advanced :) but it was cloud puff4 that was causing the cloud I found offensive. The lighting seems to change out there somewhere and it causes just an overly bright and non well defined mass of cloudlike substance. Ive had great difficulty in making high def clouds for X Plane. I love the close up interaction and the way the clouds have such presence - they are there as flowing objects that you fly thru and around...much better than in other sims imo. much more enjoyable. but id love to have closeup soft clouds and far away well defined towering cumulus. | Dave | I've been around for most of my life. There's always a sunset happening somewhere in the world that somebody is enjoying.
June 8, 20178 yr 1 hour ago, sightseer said: Ive had great difficulty in making high def clouds for X Plane. I love the close up interaction and the way the clouds have such presence - they are there as flowing objects that you fly thru and around...much better than in other sims imo. much more enjoyable. but id love to have closeup soft clouds and far away well defined towering cumulus. Fortunately the latest revision of the weather system (during one of the betas of X-Plane 11) allows more control over the appearence of cloud puffs, in terms of more granular control of size, density, transparency, etc. for each of the 6 cloud puff layers. However it requires changing the relevant cloud datarefs. So what you want to achieve might be doable, but some skill in working with textures and datarefs might be needed. "Society has become so fake that the truth actually bothers people".
June 19, 20178 yr On 9.6.2017 at 1:47 AM, Murmur said: Fortunately the latest revision of the weather system (during one of the betas of X-Plane 11) allows more control over the appearence of cloud puffs, in terms of more granular control of size, density, transparency, etc. for each of the 6 cloud puff layers. However it requires changing the relevant cloud datarefs. So what you want to achieve might be doable, but some skill in working with textures and datarefs might be needed. Do you think it's possible to remove the outer rings of 2D puffs entirely and instead increase the draw area of the close proximity 3D puffs? - Currently giving X-Plane 12.10 a spin on Shadow PC. 10 years with X-Plane now, since 10.20
June 19, 20178 yr 2 hours ago, Colonel X said: Do you think it's possible to remove the outer rings of 2D puffs entirely and instead increase the draw area of the close proximity 3D puffs? The outer rings can be removed (using the "last_res_3d" dataref), but I think that the draw area of the closer rings cannot be increased significantly. In any case that is not necessary. Actually, all the rings are drawn in the same way, so there are not 3D and 2D rings. The outer rings indeed have better performance, because their puff density is lower compared to the inner rings. So the right way would be not to draw the inner rings (using the "first_res_3d" dataref) and draw only the outer rings (3,4,5), increasing their puff size if necessary to compensate for the lower puff density (although, IIRC, in the new revised weather system, the puff density can also be controlled for each specific ring of clouds). This should give better performance and visuals, but there is one drawback: the outer rings get drawn at progressively higher altitudes (don't know why), so if you only draw the 3rd, 4th or 5th cloud ring, the cloud base will be higher than it should be. "Society has become so fake that the truth actually bothers people".
June 19, 20178 yr 1 hour ago, Murmur said: The outer rings can be removed (using the "last_res_3d" dataref), but I think that the draw area of the closer rings cannot be increased significantly. In any case that is not necessary. Actually, all the rings are drawn in the same way, so there are not 3D and 2D rings. The outer rings indeed have better performance, because their puff density is lower compared to the inner rings. So the right way would be not to draw the inner rings (using the "first_res_3d" dataref) and draw only the outer rings (3,4,5), increasing their puff size if necessary to compensate for the lower puff density (although, IIRC, in the new revised weather system, the puff density can also be controlled for each specific ring of clouds). This should give better performance and visuals, but there is one drawback: the outer rings get drawn at progressively higher altitudes (don't know why), so if you only draw the 3rd, 4th or 5th cloud ring, the cloud base will be higher than it should be. I found that setting "last_res_3D" to 3 (killing the two outer rings) just looks much better - getting rid of "texture style" clouds and emphasizing X-Plane's soft and realistic puffs. You will probably get less cloud view distance at higher altitudes, but it looks better, as the outer cloud rings just look nasty at altitude anyway. Combine it with the cloud shadow settings I listed below, and it's really, really crisp. set( "sim/private/controls/clouds/cloud_shadow_lighten_ratio", 1.0) set( "sim/private/controls/clouds/shadow_size", 8096) set( "sim/private/controls/clouds/last_res_3d", 3) - Currently giving X-Plane 12.10 a spin on Shadow PC. 10 years with X-Plane now, since 10.20
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