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

[Poppet 709]

Off Topic posts and rants removed.

[dgraham1284 92]

On 9/2/2018 at 3:57 PM, Dave CBFS said:

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...

Good catch

[fakeflyer737 992]

Does PBR textures change anything inside the VC or are we just talking externals ?

[simbol 5,819]

1 minute ago, fakeflyer737 said:

Does PBR textures change anything inside the VC or are we just talking externals ?

Anything that implement PBR texture will change.. so if you implement PBR Texturing inside the VC, it changes.

S.

[fakeflyer737 992]

2 hours ago, simbol said:

Anything that implement PBR texture will change.. so if you implement PBR Texturing inside the VC, it changes.

S.

I see but what would the change...like reflections on the cockpit glass screens
?

[simbol 5,819]

1 hour ago, fakeflyer737 said:

I see but what would the change...like reflections on the cockpit glass screens
?

Lighting conditions depending of the texture material, something that is "Chrome or Metal" should react different to light as something that is "Leather" for example.

Regards,
S.

[kand 205]

Will PBR help make clouds look better? 

[Guest]

3 hours ago, fakeflyer737 said:

I see but what would the change...like reflections on the cockpit glass screens

PBR will make the simulated world look less "flat" (some call it "cartoonish") ... it'll provide more depth in color variance in response to a light source

PBR + ray tracing will make the light come alive (literally)

PBR + ray tracing + nVidia 20xx series GPU will make it all happen with good FPS

The entire simulated environment will respond to PBR (that includes inside VC, aircraft, outside, clouds, everything) ... there are of course variants in implementation of PBR.

Cheers, Rob.

[iFlySimX 751]

4 hours ago, Rob Ainscough said:

PBR will make the simulated world look less "flat" (some call it "cartoonish") ... it'll provide more depth in color variance in response to a light source

PBR + ray tracing will make the light come alive (literally)

PBR + ray tracing + nVidia 20xx series GPU will make it all happen with good FPS

The entire simulated environment will respond to PBR (that includes inside VC, aircraft, outside, clouds, everything) ... there are of course variants in implementation of PBR.

Cheers, Rob.

And with the 1080TI? 

[Keven Menard 658]

40 minutes ago, Le Français said:

And with the 1080TI? 

All you'd get with a 1080 would be PBR... We're many many years away from seeing Ray Tracing in our sims.

[Guest]

22 hours ago, Keven Menard said:

Ray Tracing in our sims.

Are you sure about that? 🙂

Cheers, Rob.

[Keven Menard 658]

3 minutes ago, Rob Ainscough said:

Are you sure about that? 🙂

Cheers, Rob.

Sometimes things are too good to be true... 

[davetallpilot 0]

On 9/3/2018 at 9:20 AM, Chock said:

Regrettably, a large number of people appear to want pretty pictures over and above everything else when it comes to flight sims. To some extent that is understandable when it tends to be screenshots of new products which whet buyer's appetites.

It is after all the point of a flight simulator to simulate flight, and how P3D does that has not really progressed much in terms of capabilities and functionality beyond how FS95 achieved it (compare a flight model file from the two if you think this isn't the case). The system often requires developers to step completely outside of the simulator itself to make things possible, which itself can impact on performance sometimes. And that performance has been another elephant in the room for decades; MSFS and its derivatives such as P3D - which let's not forget is on VERSION 4 at this point, so it's had some time - have been notorious for requiring a sledgehammer to crack a walnut in terms of hardware horsepower. The last thing we need is for the developers to be pouring more petrol on that particular fire.

So yeah, bring PBR on, but make sure it is accompanied by a serious developmental attempt to ensure that you don't need HAL 900 to be able to run the thing at more that 20 fps. And then perhaps update the database so it isn't full of nav aids and airports which were switched off and closed down fifteen years ago in the real world. Things like that matter more than tarted up textures.

It is curious how difficult a project it seems to be to optimize the code for modern processors.  I suspect there is just so much legacy cruft in there it is impossible to reengineer it the way it must be done without committing the cardinal sin of breaking everyone's favorite add-ons.  Every P3D update has touted performance improvements but it is still quite easy in a PMDG aircraft at a decent payware airport to reduce the frame rates to unworkable levels.

Earlier a poster suggested that updating navaids and airports from their time capsule status would threaten add-on developers' revenue.  I don't see how adding the 5th runway to the default KATL could possibly prevent a fan of the airport from buying a much improved version.  Nor do I see removing decommissioned VORs and adding 5 letter fixes so something closer to a real world flight plan can be flown in an aircraft without an add-on navigation system will suddenly make people quit buying study aircraft and fly the defaults.

As far as the graphics go real world flight simulators are also behind the curve and suffer from the same cartoonish graphics as P3D.  Game engines have moved beyond that years ago with acceptable frame rates so it is curious that flight simulators cannot catch up.  The state of the art I work with has satellite imagery placed on the terrain mesh which is reasonable at altitude but without polygon structures down low looks ridiculous.  The latest update adds particle based precipitation but most airports still do not have any polygon structures outside of the airport boundary which makes the approach quite unrealistic.

On 9/3/2018 at 10:30 AM, jabloomf1230 said:

Hey Chock, although I agree that the focus of a flightsim should be how realistically the aircraft is simulated, that is also the hardest part of the app to program. That's because the programmers are usually not real world pilots. And even when they are, they cannot possibly be familiar with every possible aircraft. For example, the developers at A2A own and/or fly most of the real world GA aircraft that they simulate and sell. But with regards to the P-51, they had to find real world pilots to test out their simulated version to see if its flight dynamics were realistic.

Hence, flight dynamics is a property of each aircraft and not  the sim. What is embedded in the sim is basic FD, just enough to make a default aircraft conform to the laws of physics. The complex aircraft go to great lengths to overcome the simplified built-in flight dynamics. I believe that the best simulated aircraft in P3d4 easily surpass any FS9 versions. But we can disagree on that point.

I agree with your analysis completely but disagree that it makes any sense to continue in this fashion.  The flight dynamics issue is almost exactly like the situation with real time ray tracing.  The original flight model dynamics were a hack since the processing power at the time had no hope of doing real time computational fluid dynamics.  Just like specular maps were a hack to get around the impossibility of computing EMR physics.  At some point continuing to spend resources trying to squeeze a few more tiny gains of realism/performance out of a hack make less since than accurately modeling the real world.

X-Plane of course makes an interesting foray into this method (with its own set of hacks and omissions) but LM could use their extensive CFD knowledge and experience to build something much more accurate.  This should make simplistic 3rd party aircraft far more realistic even if the developer has never been in any airplane let alone that specific one.  It shouldn't reduce the desirability of study aircraft very much since the complex system modeling is the killer feature and now more time can be devoted to that instead of trying to hack an ancient dynamics engine into closely matching flight test data.

Edited September 20, 2018 by davetallpilot
grammar and spelling

[chass32 138]

Carenado already have several planes with PBR textures in XP11. I assume that using these textures on p3d planes shouldn´t be too complicated? Or are we seeing another upgrade at a cost?

Cheers

Carlos

[simbol 5,819]

1 hour ago, chass32 said:

Carenado already have several planes with PBR textures in XP11. I assume that using these textures on p3d planes shouldn´t be too complicated? Or are we seeing another upgrade at a cost?

Cheers

Carlos

The way you build planes and objects for XP11 is totally different from P3D, so in answer to your question it is not just a copy and paste job.

They will need to re-visit each of their 3D models and put a lot of work and effort to re-map and adjust the materials inside of 3DMax and I doubt anybody would like to do such job for free..

S.