This will be useful for those who are working on MSFS sceneries. I think I finally mastered multi-room parallax texture properly. Here's the test video with a simple cube test building. Emission works too. What's funny is that rooms are randomized somehow by the sim. They are showing in a different order than I have them in my background texture. Same for emission rooms. But that's OK, I think it's meant to remove a pattern look from large buildings, especially at night. See night look in the second half of the video.

This building has no 3D interior - it's just a testing cube, basically. One side has a universal material I'm going to use on different buildings depending on each model, by using UV maps for whatever windows I need, and 3 sides have a more specific material for 2 large hotel buildings my upcoming scenery will include. Full PBR structure: it has maps for albedo (window front with shutters etc.), ambient occlusion, roughness, metallic, behind-windows albedo, and emission for the random night lighting look. Rooms are actually rendered in Blender in 3D and their renderings are edited for parallax 2D texture.  

 

 

The way I "reverse-engineered" it is based on the MSFS SDK sample parallax material (found in sample materials, duh!). I took the room perspective look from the background 4x4 room texture there as a guide and made my rooms. Then the rest of the PBR textures are pretty straightforward (don't use any metalness on transparent glass!). It took a lot of time to figure out the right transparencies, glass reflections and nail down the look. But there is nothing special about the textures - they are nurmal MSFS PBR textures, basically, except for the background "behind glass albedo" which is different size, exactly as in the sample. I did similar material before for a single room for my CNC3 and SYKZ sceneries, and now I have a the multi-room material for my upcoming CYOW scenery. The Blender2MSFS settings are like this for this particular material: specular 1, alpha 1, the rest surface parameters are 0. Albedo color white, emissive color - slightly yellowish, alpha multiplier 1. Parallax parameters  - this is for 4x4 room textures the exact sizes of sample material! These were difficult to figure out as they are not documented well - scale 0.60, room size X 0.50 Y 0.25, number XY 4. All texture maps are set with texture files. Everything else default.

Excellent work Roman. What do you think the performance hit would be like on this in urban areas? 

This is awesome! I hope scenery developers will introduce such native features to MSFS in their sceneries!

Fascinating. I hope you'll consider some european scenery in the future....(pm me for suggestions 🤣)

48 minutes ago, omarsmak30 said:

This is awesome! I hope scenery developers will introduce such native features to MSFS in their sceneries!

We have been using Parallax windows on our sceneries basically since MSFS came out:

 

We have these at Key West, Basel and Quiberon as well.

It's a neat trick, and should be used mostly for secondary buildings, those that might not deserve a fully modeled interior, or in airports so big you cannot really afford modeled interiors everywhere.

Edited February 9, 20215 yr by virtuali

5 minutes ago, virtuali said:

We have been using Parallax windows on our sceneries basically since MSFS came out:

 

niiiice, I didn't realize that, awesome job !

Looks fantastic.

Since the SDK has quite a few buildings from hand done airports with this it's a great shame they don't also offer free floating panels with various emitting interiors that you can bury wherever you like. 

Edited February 9, 20215 yr by superspud

Awesome job, especially at night when seeing through the glass! I hope scenery developers will learn to make the most of the SDK when making future sceneries. Your findings will surely help them out!

12 hours ago, virtuali said:

We have been using Parallax windows on our sceneries basically since MSFS came out:

I think a short parallax test video from this scenery actually made me go "Wow! I have to figure this out!" a while back. I must say, this is possibly the most gorgeous airport scenery ever... Inspiring. You set the standard for me 🙂 I hope to release my CYOW Montreal in April and I'm aiming for the similar level of detail... 

13 hours ago, Carts85 said:

Excellent work Roman. What do you think the performance hit would be like on this in urban areas? 

Basically it's an ingenious trick, because it's just a single flat texture for all the rooms, there is no 3D geometry behind the glass, so I would expect a minimal FPS hit. As virtuali correctly said, it's great for secondary buildings. The main terminal I'm doing with internal modelling. For everything else there is Parallax Windows material.