Has anyone tried this TerraFlora global vegetation texture upgrade for P3dv4?

5 hours ago, ralinn said:

PBR uses realistic shading and lighting models along with measured surface values to represent real world materials accurately.

Carefull: In fact PBR in fact only say that the BDRF meets certain conditions. You would be surprised how many methods can meet these expectations although they are quite old.

We should better say PBR for gaming engines. These are in fact special shaders and a certain family of workflows, when they were were pushed forward by NVidia and AMD.

30 minutes ago, warbirds said:

Has anyone tried this TerraFlora global vegetation texture upgrade for P3dv4?

Yup, it runs a bit better than the default stuff in terms of FPS and looks nicer. I'd recommend it, especially since it isn't that expensive and definitely makes things look nicer.

2 hours ago, Chock said:

Yup, it runs a bit better than the default stuff in terms of FPS and looks nicer. I'd recommend it, especially since it isn't that expensive and definitely makes things look nicer.

Just copy and paste or it´s needed to insert anything on the scenery file?

 

I tried it and flew around Ayers Rock in Australia. It looked like a moat existed around the rock. I offloaded it and tried Orbx Australia and now the ground textures are just about perfect. Problem is though that no house has walls anymore! I hope Orbx do fully FSW compatible stuff in the future or maybe Turbulent take an interest in Oz.

Big Bear DLC video! Post your video's of the Big Bear scenery when you get it. You know you want it :) Curious to see how it looks on different systems from low to high end one's!

 

2 hours ago, Learjet777 said:

Big Bear DLC video! Post your video's of the Big Bear scenery when you get it. You know you want it :) Curious to see how it looks on different systems from low to high end one's!

 

Thanks Learjet777 thats a really nice short video. The airport looks very beautiful and coming in to land you can really get a good idea of the excellent detail Turbulant have provided.

Outside of the airport itself the quality appears to drop a little when compared to competitors like aerosoft and orbx and I guess thats where some people will percieve the value being lost a little.

Meigs Field for FSX: SE covers a much bigger area at a lower cost (£14.99 instead of £19.99 both on steam) however once more 3PD come on board for FSW especially the bigger developers I expect this to even out over time and you are probably paying a premuim because FSW itself is in early access.

Personally I think the price is fine for this stage of the FSW development and I think more choice will mean better competitive prices and more expansive scenery offerings - you've made an excellent point in that these prices are really helping to support development both for Dovetail and the 3PD's so we all shouldn't forget that.

The real point of concern here is the quality of the airport given that it's a showcase for scenery for FSW and as far as I can tell this is right up there with the best you can get so Turbulant deserves much praise for this.

20 hours ago, Chock said:

Yup, I know exactly what it is (I work for Adobe and Apple training people in the film and TV industry on how to create CGI for movies and stuff like that, so I'd be in trouble if I didn't know about all that rendering malarkey lol). But...

I wasn't attempting to write a precise treatise on what exactly is involved in PBR and its use in this thread, I was merely pointing out that it can impact on frame rates, depending on how one goes about it.

This is because physically based rendering can use all kinds of different techniques, it isn't like, for example, the PSD or the WMA file format, in that those are proprietary formats with a strictly-controlled structure, nor is it akin to open formats such as PDF, PNG or HTML, since these too are to a specific standard even though they are not proprietary, and that is true for all formats, i.e. you can't make up your own JPEG encoding or create your own MP3 format or some such, those things are hard and fast formats to specific standards, PBR is not like that at all, it is a technique.

In other words, PBR is the catch all name for a series of methodologies one can cherry pick from, i.e. it is a 'concept' not a specific procedure to a strict set of rules. It can utilise all kinds of different methods to achieve the result one is after. Producing PBR can use only textures, and often does so in combination with additional sub textures, so it is at least in some respects not a million miles away from using things such as bump maps, alphas and other purely texture/channel-based techniques, but as a concept and indeed as a working methodology PBR could use any method you like to get the results you are after, because PBR has no absolute hard and fast rules on how one achieves the end result.

Now having said that, its more widespread use is distilling it down into some generally accepted methods, but it is still nevertheless in flux as a technique. Some artists may regularly use a specific procedure to create their PBR effects, but this in no way means they are utilising a universally accepted method for PBR, because there isn't such a thing. Well, not yet anyway.

From your original post, at first, it sounded like you were over simplifying it and trying to make it sound "gimmicky". Apologies for misunderstanding, the "One of those ways is by adding additional polygons to create the variances in a surface to allow it to vary which parts reflect light at different angles, and that absolutely can impact performance." threw me off, as it can be interpreted in a few ways.

Although there are (as you say) multiple work flows in PBR, they are all trying to achieve a goal, more accurately, with minimum room for error.

For example, regardless of which workflow you use, the idea behind FSW's is to make the end result more physically correct, rather than an artists interpretation of what is correct. Art is subjective, so the end results from multiple artists can be inconsistent. The great thing about PBR (FSWs workflow) in simulation is that things will only look better and better over time. In my opinion, it was a needed addition in flight simulation for the sake of consistency.

Affect on framerate? Sure, but the amount of bang you get for your buck is great. The way Dovetail have implemented it is incredibly clever (Kudos to Dovetail).

As a Substance Designer/Painter user, the possibilities and details you can implement in to the work flow are incredible. The end result is fantastic and the road to achieving that result is both fun and rewarding.

(I totally edited this post about a billion times)

Thank you for good information, ralinn.

Nice to see the actual developers in these forums for FSW, much thanks for reaching out to the community and answering some questions from all developers. Looks like we are on the right track now. A long way to go, but on the right track, in my eye's :)

If it looks this good at the beginning then PBR should really stun over the years to come.

I picked up the airport yesterday; really nicely done for the most part, good value for money. The quality of the PBR does kind of throw problems with AO (which are probably current engine limitations) into sharper relief - unfortunately the autogen can look like it's covered in ash on the other side from the sun.

Generally though very happy with the DLC and with the direction FSW is going.

51 minutes ago, scotchegg said:

If it looks this good at the beginning then PBR should really stun over the years to come.

I picked up the airport yesterday; really nicely done for the most part, good value for money. The quality of the PBR does kind of throw problems with AO (which are probably current engine limitations) into sharper relief - unfortunately the autogen can look like it's covered in ash on the other side from the sun.

Generally though very happy with the DLC and with the direction FSW is going.

The thing is DTG will fix those issues redoing everything from the ground up, like they did with TrueSky. It´s good and bad, it´s bad cause they will have to figure every aspect of an specif thing, like autogen, before they roll out an update for it. It´s good because when they update it will be something really new. 

On the today´s presentation Stephen said that one of the focus right now is the PBR 2.0 for the terrain and it will probably fix most of the visual issues we have right now on the ground, that´s what I understood.

7 minutes ago, ca_metal said:

On the today´s presentation Stephen said that one of the focus right now is the PBR 2.0 for the terrain and it will probably fix most of the visual issues we have right now on the ground, that´s what I understood.

That is going to be awesome!

Just curious but does anyone remember FTX Aero. Was thar PBR?