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

[G-RFRY 1,711]

If has no affect on addons I'm ok with it, I'm a one sim one car guy can`t afford to run two.  

I put this to one of the third party developers his reply was, LM always inform use well in advance of any future development but cannot discuss this, so they know which hopefully means they are working on it. 

Edited September 2, 2018 by rjfry

[CFIJose 5,485]

I'm no PBR expert, but I did embrace XPlane 11 and upgraded from v10. Some v10 airports and planes worked in v11 and some did not, but everything looked shinier. The new airplanes designed for XP 11 exclusively look even better (shinier) than previous versions, but it's still XP.

If we can still keep compatibility with most addons and improve the P3D rendering engine, then we have something great to look forward to.

Now, if only we could convince devs to embrace the xml method of installing scenery, airports, and airplanes. 😀

[NorwegianAviator 60]

While this is great news if it's true and will definately improve the sim, I also hope they don't forget about improving other areas in the sim. Like fixing some legacy bugs etc as well as new features. Anyways, great news. Looking forward to see this PBR in action 🙂

[LRW 42]

5 hours 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.

That indicates that it's not just a rendering technique, but an entirely different methodology for developers.

[jabloomf1230 2,445]

You have to understand that 3rd party developers have a love-hate relationship when a sim introduces a new feature. They embrace the new capabilities but they also are realistic about the the increased development overhead.

Edited September 2, 2018 by jabloomf1230

[Bobsk8 12,714]

I am positive that  the day that this is released, many will install it, and then let us know all about  their add ons that don't work anymore. 😉

[mtrainer 136]

Part of the news mentioned in the article quoted indicated it was released to Beta in August.  Not sure how long LM spent in beta in past releases, but I'm hoping it comes out in the October timeframe.

I'm hoping, among other things, they will fix the time issue and the time zone issue (both of which have downloadable payware fixes).  A company that makes everything from planes to rockets, must have someone they can tap into for the proper calculations.  It's fundamentals such as these that need to be addressed before eye-candy.

Mark

 

[B777ER 2,486]

17 hours 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.

 

I think most people won't get it but this is likely to just as big news as PBR.

Edited September 2, 2018 by B777ER

[B777ER 2,486]

8 hours ago, virtuali said:

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.

So, Umberto, I am assuming you will be calling the FSDT team together for an 8 hour training day "PBR How-To Powerpoint presented by Umberto" via Skype followed by the latest "Chicago Airport Authority Revised Construction Plan - O'Hare v3, volume 2"? LOL

[GCBraun 2,392]

Personally, I don't care so much about external textures from the plane. Would prefer if the actually made night textures and lightning in P3D look more realistic.

[virtuali 4,421]

1 hour ago, B777ER said:

So, Umberto, I am assuming you will be calling the FSDT team together for an 8 hour training day "PBR How-To Powerpoint presented by Umberto" via Skype followed by the latest "Chicago Airport Authority Revised Construction Plan - O'Hare v3, volume 2"? LOL

Well, I thank you for your assists...didn't want to use this thread as an excuse to discuss O'Hare, but now that you raised it, it's all your's fault 🙂

The training session(s) you are referring happened already, more than a year ago, when we started working on O'Hare.

We made a very simple assumption, and we bet on it:

- All available flight simulators will use PBR, eventually, because this is the direction the gaming industry went years ago, and all modern texturing tools are based on this.

So, we started making O'Hare as a full PBR project.

Each and every texture in it is made using physically correct materials with the full roughness/metalness workflow, and the modeling is done entirely by projecting very hi-polygon models over low-polygon models, to the obtain the physically correct normal maps too. Photoshop has been phased out. We only use Substance Painter right now. 

Since everything was made 100% PBR, we had to write a custom plugin filter for Substance Painter, to create non-PBR textures, to be used in the current P3D version. It looks good, but not as it does inside Substance Painter.

Which means, if we would need to export to a simulator that supports PBR, it would be enough to just NOT do that last conversion step, and see the scenery in its original quality.

Edited September 2, 2018 by virtuali

[Gibbage 199]

Interesting!  This hits close to home.  Im a developer who has been working with PBR for some time and im really excited for the possibility that PBR may be added into P3D.

What does it mean for the developers?  Not much.  Just a new way of using the spec channel and some education for the basics.  In the long run, most new texturing tools like Quixel and Substance output PBR.  I have been using Quixel to texture cockpits for years, and the results are quite stunning.  

What does it mean for customers?  More realistic metals and better textures overall.  Its better to give examples.

PBR Zenith 701 in the now canceled Flight Sim World.  

The same model converted into "Specular" for P3D without PBR

The metals just dont look right in specular.  Im still tweaking things a bit, but for me the visual quality is night and day.  Plus with tools like Quixel, development is really easy in PBR.  

PBR is the future.  Current development tools work with them and are able to improve the visual effects.  Yes, dev's will need to learn a little, but the results can be astonishing.  

Just check out the surface detail.  You can even see the bug splats on the leading edges!

 

[jabloomf1230 2,445]

57 minutes ago, Gibbage said:

Interesting!  This hits close to home.  Im a developer who has been working with PBR for some time and im really excited for the possibility that PBR may be added into P3D.

Can I ask you a PBR-specific question? The textures that LM included for the 3D Speedtree models appear to be PBR textures, as Speedtree utilizes PBR textures by default. One can see this by opening a Speedtree texture in Photoshop. Does P3d 4 already support PBR in a limited way? I'm not versed enough in HLSL to know whether the shaders have been updated silently. Thanks.

[Gibbage 199]

2 minutes ago, jabloomf1230 said:

Can I ask you a PBR-specific question? The textures that LM included for the 3D Speedtree models appear to be PBR textures, as Speedtree utilizes PBR textures by default. One can see this by opening a Speedtree texture in Photoshop. Does P3d 4 already support PBR in a limited way? I'm not versed enough in HLSL to know whether the shaders have been updated silently. Thanks.

I have not seen anything to suggest that it already supports PBR.  I see no mention of it in the shaders or in the SDK.  Im guessing that Speedtree assets just come that way by default and they just slot the glossyness channel for the spec as a simple conversion.

[Dave CBFS 55]

Not sure if it's related, but have a look in your "Prepar3D v4 / SimObjects / Misc / Desert Hawk 3.1 / texture" folder.

Interesting texture names...