41 minutes ago, akita said:

To make ground textures respond to seasons, you need them proceduraly and have normal maps to store data on it's channels; for example the alpha channel of a ground texture can represent what gets a redish color in autumn obviously using shaders.

MSFS does none of that for ground textures, this is not just about seasons too, it's about any modern method to render a photorealistic material.

Since snow will accumulate almost anywhere* it can be done using just a white tone that covers everything.

They could try with color corrections, but will probably look bad.

*Other factors on procedural terrain may affect snow, like mountain slopes where snow might not accumulate and only the peak will be covered with snow. It mostly depends on the engine, but the idea is the same.

Long story short, although they promised, I can't see it done in MSFS in a good manner unless they change the way they generate their ground textures.

 

Irrespective of the type of texture used for the ground, modern shader tech can be applied on top these days.

Shader tech can handle it all for you, whatever type of texture you use as a base.   Shader tech is already used in ForzaTech, the engine they use.. it's just a question of synching it with the appropriate effects and sending the appropriate info to the GPU...

Modern development platforms  increasingly include node based editors that can create shaders without the need for actual code that allow users to direct various textures, maps, and mathematical functions into output values like the diffuse color, the specular color and intensity, roughness/metalness, height, normal, and so on. Automatic compilation then turns the graph into an actual, compiled shader with the CPU sending the base, and the GPU interpreting it based on various formulae submitted to it.

Heres an example of modern shader tech in use in one of my projects...   these use the exact same textures throughout.. the only thing changing is the shader which is being applied by the GPU over the top of the texture being generated by the CPU.  The base textures here are generated procedurally, with normal maps and then have the shader applied as post processing...  as long as you are using DX11 or better, this is easy to do..  as i said above, the trick is getting the right info to the GPU from things like the weather system to corrctly manipulate the shaders after the CPU has generated the base.

Shaders are more than capable of varying things like depth of snow based on angle of ground.. thats just another parameter as you can see on some of the rocks, tree trunks and leaves below, where the snow cover is less than on a flat surface.  Also the shader in the below pics is different on the path surface to the grass surface.

Obviously you can have different shaders based on different functions,  so a ground shader, a building shader, even a clay court tennis shader if you like..  all you have to do is identify the area and then apply the appropriate shader which will be a link to their existing AI generation engine.

 

 

 

Graham

Edited October 12, 20205 yr by Moria15

1 hour ago, Moria15 said:

 all you have to do is identify the area and then apply the appropriate shader which will be a link to their existing AI generation engine.

And how are you going to identify what is what, without using anything beyond an albedo/orthophoto to attach a shader in the first place?

They already do shaders for water, airport tarmac and more, orthos are a different story I suspect.

 

Edited October 12, 20205 yr by akita

1 hour ago, akita said:

And how are you going to identify what is what, without using anything beyond an albedo/orthophoto to attach a shader in the first place?

They already do shaders for water, airport tarmac and more, orthos are a different story I suspect.

 

If my AI understands that this is a road, this is fields, this is a city, this is a building, this is a tree then you have the AI to determine which shader to use.  It's not rocket science, but it is complex, especially when using AI generated procedural terrain.

Graham

41 minutes ago, Moria15 said:

If my AI understands that this is a road, this is fields, this is a city, this is a building, this is a tree then you have the AI to determine which shader to use.  It's not rocket science, but it is complex, especially when using AI generated procedural terrain.

Graham

Possible? yeah, will it look as good as what you posted? when using orthos as a base, I really doubt that.

Even now I can note problems with orthos, where AI vegetation has an obvious color seam.

I prefer they use the AI to nuke those orthos and replace them with better base textures🙂

 

7 hours ago, ErichB said:

Not entirely true. 

Seasonal lighting (sun position) is correct as would be the weather   It's only the seasonal textures which they need to implement and that is on the 'to do' list

This^^^^^
 

Confirming that it is possible to do seasons no matter how it’s going to be implemented!

Speaking of shader tech, I tried to use 3Dmigoto with MFS in order to apply my own shader mods (to make autumn leaves, for example), but unfortunately it just crashes with MFS. Perhaps I'm doing something wrong.

6 hours ago, akita said:

And how are you going to identify what is what, without using anything beyond an albedo/orthophoto to attach a shader in the first place?

They already do shaders for water, airport tarmac and more, orthos are a different story I suspect.

 

It is very easy to apply a LUT for the ground textures. Since stuff that is green is almost always vegetation it is rather trivial to have green shifted to yellow/orange/brown while leaving the rest of the texture unaltered. 

Here is a very quick example I made in photoshop using hue and saturation adjustments only.

The only real issue is what happens to the few things on the satellite image that are green but aren't vegetation, ie tennis courts, astro turf, pavement with green marking, ect? There are satellite images like the USGS NAIP that has infrared in addition to true color. Using images like that would make 'masking' the vegetation area incredibly easy.

1 minute ago, Keto Ketchup said:

Speaking of shader tech, I tried to use 3Dmigoto with MFS in order to apply my own shader mods (to make autumn leaves, for example), but unfortunately it just crashes with MFS. Perhaps I'm doing something wrong.

I haven't gotten it to work either.

And can people stop saying 'shader tech' - this stuff has been around for almost 20 years now.

3 minutes ago, L3m0n said:

And can people stop saying 'shader tech' - this stuff has been around for almost 20 years now.

Shader tech, shader tech, shader tech!

Sorry, couldn't resist 😉

2 minutes ago, L3m0n said:

I haven't gotten it to work either.

And can people stop saying 'shader tech' - this stuff has been around for almost 20 years now.

30 actually..  introduced by Pixar in 1988.  First GPU's supporting pixel shader.. 20 years.  3D shaders  10 years..  Compute Shaders using the GPU's from a pre-generated CPU texture (ie "shader tech" as it's known today) as would be required here..  4 or 5 years and only in the last 2 years has it seen reasonable practical application in Game Engines, so this tech has matured immeasurably since this application started development.

But  Hey ho.

Graham

9 minutes ago, Moria15 said:

  4 or 5 years and only in the last 2 years has it seen reasonable practical application in Game Engines, so this tech has matured immeasurably since this application started development.

That isn't true at all though. Pixel and vertex shaders have been in heavy usage since the early 2000s. It has been a normal part of game development since DX8. LUTs have been used in games for at least a decade now. What you can do today with shaders is, by and large, the same thing you could do when this game started development in 2016.

And I have literally never heard anyone say 'shader tech' out side of here, not at siggraph, gdc, ect.

41 minutes ago, L3m0n said:

Hey!  How did you make those MSFS night time textures on the right?  😄