Hi,

I'm in the process of setting up a new system. On my old rig, I was using REX Sky Force PTA presets and ENVTEX for additional textures. I use Active Sky for weather, and SF for clouds. When I set up the old system a few years ago, I set it and forgot it. I haven't tinkered with textures or shaders in quite a while.

What is the gold standard cocktail for shaders/textures these days? I don't want to get too deep into tweaking things, but if I can get a nice look with newer products and not a ton of work, I'd be ok with purchasing something new. I know a lot of the work with Tomato Shade was done to apply reflections to aircraft w/o PBR, but now that PBR is ubiquitous, I'm not sure if that is needed anymore.

Thanks.

 

 

 

Wow. Busy here today. Bumped off the first page in less than an hour, and almost of the second page.

ENVTEX and ENVSHADE from Toga Projects are cheap and very simple shader/texture programs that are commonly used.

I use tomatoshade for P3D v4.5. 

Easy to use, free, and actively supported.

In 4.5 I have Sky Force and Environment Force, both on full auto, set it and forget it. It Is amazing. I'll be doing he same with 5.0. 

I haven't tried much else, but have stuck with Tomatoshade and the RD Preset for the time being.

Edited April 15, 20206 yr by thepilot

1 hour ago, mtr75 said:

In 4.5 I have Sky Force and Environment Force, both on full auto, set it and forget it. It Is amazing. I'll be doing he same with 5.0. 

Do you need to use the REX weather engine in SF to take advantage of automated mode, or will it also work with Active Sky?

Edit: answered my own question. Yes, it does work. https://www.realenvironmentxtreme.com/forums/index.php?/topic/51090-automated-mode-and-active-sky/&tab=comments#comment-316754

Edited April 16, 20206 yr by duckbilled

I use tomatoshade with the tomato-bright preset (comes with tomatoshade). That preset has a lot more realistic atmospheric scattering than RD IMHO.

At of this moment Envtex Shade is not HF3 ready I get a message that there are comptability issues from Envshade self so the shaders will not load.

 

Edited April 16, 20206 yr by RuudMeijer

Thanks all.

I ended up going with Env. Force since I already have Sky Force. Seems like a good set and forget option, and it is on sale for 40% off. Testing it right now.

 

Tomatoshade v3.1 here with RD-TomatoShade-Preset 1.8. Amazing visuals and effects on the ground in rainy conditions:

 

4 hours ago, f4f4wildcat said:

Tomatoshade v3.1 here with RD-TomatoShade-Preset 1.8. Amazing visuals and effects on the ground in rainy conditions:

 

What textures are you using?

 

Ground textures come with the scenery Aerosoft Mallorca X Evolution (not the puddles and reflections, they're from the Tomato shaders). In the sky I have added HDE v2.0 Sky Textures converted for FSX over the default P3D45.

The GOLD standard has and will always be PTA. It's too bad the dev is often MIA. It works perfectly in v4.5 HF2 and it's still the easiest way to make your sim look amazing!