Multi-room Parallax material. Finally!

[Roman Design 344]

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.

[Carts85 1,203]

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

[omarsmak30 4,067]

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

[Tom_L 522]

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

[virtuali 4,419]

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, 2021 by virtuali

[omarsmak30 4,067]

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 !

[superspud 450]

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, 2021 by superspud

[captain420 3,099]

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!

[Roman Design 344]

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.