How Will P3D V4.4 Benefit from Physically Based Rendering (PBR)?

[jlohrenz 133]

So will this do anything for outside realism?  I'm dedicated to P3D as I have a cockpit built around it, but I've always admired the night shots from people with xplane, and the day shots, clouds, etc...always looked more realistic than what I can do in my sim.

[Guest]

1 hour ago, duckbilled said:

So it will basically break every add on that is rendered in the sim?

The negativity here is just incredible ... who said anything about "breaking"?  I just indicated for PBR to be leveraged textures need to be updated, this is how it worked in XP10 to XP11 - there are plenty of non-PBR textures in XP11 that didn't break XP11 ... it's just a texture.  I said nothing about P3D other than where did the link come from (which was answered)?

Some of you members will take a statement like "It's 72F and Sunny outside and I'm taking my dog for a nice walk" and 3 thread pages later it's turned in "Hurricane moved in, house is demolished and my dog is dead" ... it's sorta interesting how something can go from one statement of fact and end up being something completely different in just a matter of a few posts.

Cheers, Rob.

[NZ255 309]

59 minutes ago, jlund said:

What does the "full Visual Studio mean?

It's a coding environment. Just for devs 🙂

[downscc 1,327]

9 minutes ago, NZ255 said:

It's a coding environment. Just for devs

I'm not a developer and I've been using Visual Studio and it's predecessors since Win 3.1.  Just a hobbyist. 

The significance of "full Visual Studio" could be very significant to the entire marketplace.  To date, one used plug-ins from Microsoft for FSX or LM for P3D that install a custom interface within the development tools that are used to shade, render or set the properties of objects.  The custom interface is part of the SDK.  The SDK has always been just a subset of what the Visual Studio is capable of, and if this means that the SDK is now going to open up development to the entire suite of Visual Studio tools then that is a big all caps WOW. Airports are going to take on near photogenic qualities.  Gone will be the days of cartoon graphics.

 

[NZ255 309]

23 minutes ago, downscc said:

I'm not a developer and I've been using Visual Studio and it's predecessors since Win 3.1.  Just a hobbyist. 

The significance of "full Visual Studio" could be very significant to the entire marketplace.  To date, one used plug-ins from Microsoft for FSX or LM for P3D that install a custom interface within the development tools that are used to shade, render or set the properties of objects.  The custom interface is part of the SDK.  The SDK has always been just a subset of what the Visual Studio is capable of, and if this means that the SDK is now going to open up development to the entire suite of Visual Studio tools then that is a big all caps WOW. Airports are going to take on near photogenic qualities.  Gone will be the days of cartoon graphics.

 

 Visual Studio doesn't do anything itself. It helps you code programs in a variety of languages.

In this case you can write gauges and programs etc in C++ that interface with the sim via SimConnect or the PDK and you can use the latest VS version as opposed to VS2015

[Dreamflight767 312]

Did they update the airport and nav database?  Why are we jumping so far ahead yet some of the basics are being ignored/skipped.

[jabloomf1230 2,445]

1 hour ago, Dreamflight767 said:

Did they update the airport and nav database?  Why are we jumping so far ahead yet some of the basics are being ignored/skipped.

There are 3rd party versions of most major airports. A 3rd party add-on already provides revised navdata. LM stays away from putting its  partners out of business. 

Edited September 2, 2018 by jabloomf1230

[duckbilled 310]

4 hours ago, Rob Ainscough said:

The negativity here is just incredible ... who said anything about "breaking"?  I just indicated for PBR to be leveraged textures need to be updated, this is how it worked in XP10 to XP11 - there are plenty of non-PBR textures in XP11 that didn't break XP11 ... it's just a texture.  I said nothing about P3D other than where did the link come from (which was answered)?

Some of you members will take a statement like "It's 72F and Sunny outside and I'm taking my dog for a nice walk" and 3 thread pages later it's turned in "Hurricane moved in, house is demolished and my dog is dead" ... it's sorta interesting how something can go from one statement of fact and end up being something completely different in just a matter of a few posts.

Cheers, Rob.

Easy now. There was a question mark after those letters. As long as everything that works in 4.3 works in 4.4, I am fine.  You did say "PBR is different way to calculate light, to leverage it's full potential it requires texture changes on just about everything that has textures (from Terrain to Aircraft to Airports)", so I was questioning whether current stuff will work. That's all.

[TravelRunner404 596]

Right so back to the original post...what can we generally expect to look better?

i have always felt X-plane had a softness to it or blending of environments and objects that made it look better overall. Is that something PBR will help with? Is this something that will change the downtown/autogen buildings? They always seem harsh as if they don’t belong in a way. Will the sim look different right away or is this something that will slowly integrate? I.e. airplanes at first, Add-on airports as the feature is added? Or is it global and can “upscale” some older textures?

 

[dgraham1284 92]

5 hours ago, Rob Ainscough said:

The negativity here is just incredible 

Are you surprised by this Rob?

By the way, great meeting you at FSExpo.

[LRW 42]

6 hours ago, Rob Ainscough said:

"Hurricane moved in, house is demolished and my dog is dead"

 

So, one pickup truck shy of a country song.

My immediate questions about PBR are how it relates to ray tracing.  Are they complementary?  i.e. Can PBR be implemented using either rasterization or ray tracing?  

[Guest]

17 minutes ago, LRW said:

Can PBR be implemented using either rasterization or ray tracing? 

Yes, they can compliment each other.

Cheers, Rob.

[virtuali 4,419]

2 hours ago, LRW said:

My immediate questions about PBR are how it relates to ray tracing.  Are they complementary?  i.e. Can PBR be implemented using either rasterization or ray tracing?  

They are entirely related. In fact, ray tracing basically *requires* PBR materials.

The fist big step, which requires lot of work from developers to redo all their texture in PBR, will be converting from non-PBR materials to PBR materials, because they cannot be converted automatically. There are tools that gives some starting point, but they don't look as good as if the material was designed as PBR right from the start.

But once you have PBR in place, going up to Ray tracing will be "easy" or, more precisely, it will be handled by the game engine (and the video card hardware, of course), but it won't require redoing the textures all over again: once you are in PBR, your materials are already physically "correct", so any improvement to the rendering engine will result in an automatic improvement of the final result.

It's surely not true that having PBR will break compatibility with existing add-ons. X-Plane 11 does have PBR, but a lot of its textures don't use it yet, but they both coexists at the same time.

The good news is that with PBR, stuff will look more like what you see in the current generation games.

The bad news is that PBR will raise the bar even higher with modeling/texturing. It requires a different set of tools and mindset, a different workflow, and new skills that must be learned. Gone will be the era of slapping a photograph on an object and calling it a "texture", or even hand-painting textures, at least not much as it used to be before.

[tonywob 4,768]

X-Plane 11 introduced PBR and the process of developers updating things was pretty quick, however many are still getting to grips with it and realising the potential it has (especially scenery developers). I expect the same to happen in P3D.

PBR isn't free, developers will have to update their textures, so everything is not going to magically look better in 4.4 (or whichever version it's coming in), but once developers start getting the hang of it and releasing new products, the results can be very impressive and immersive. 

I think it's one more nail in the coffin for FSX, especially in terms of backward compatibility. In X-Plane 11's implementation, PBR based textures (which is just the normal map with the blue channel used for reflectivity) actually works in older versions because it is using information that was unused in older versions. So perhaps we'll see the same in P3D

 

[tonywob 4,768]

1 hour ago, virtuali said:

The bad news is that PBR will raise the bar even higher with modeling/texturing. It requires a different set of tools and mindset, a different workflow, and new skills that must be learned. Gone will be the era of slapping a photograph on an object and calling it a "texture", or even hand-painting textures, at least not much as it used to be before.

Yep, and I expect the costs of aircraft and scenery to go up because of it. Texturing is much much harder for PBR. I've been using it for a small airport I'm making, and unless you can find some good ready-made materials or use something like Substance Painter, making a simple thing such as hangar takes far longer. So it's quite a process change