I'm trying to set up a 180° FOV setup in P3D similar to what I have working in X-Plane.

I have three large 43" 4K displays spaced 60° apart in a semi-hexagon such that each display has a 60° horizontal FOV and a 36° vertical FOV.

I can create three separate cameras for each view (-60°, 0°, and +60°) in P3D easily using the custom camera menu, but it doesn't let you do it starting from the "Cockpit" view that shows the forward view only without the aircraft model being rendered.  I then create two daughter child views for the left and right displays and then assign the cameras to each view to get the full 180° horizon just as if you were in an actual aircraft. 

What happens is that as you increase or decrease the viewpoint heading angle on the menu past 45° the aircraft model reappears.

How do I do this *without* showing the aircraft model?

I'm also trying to concatenate the three separate views into a single view window so I can slew the viewpoint using the hat switch instead of having only a single view moving at one time.

Edited July 23, 20214 yr by TallTanBarbie

Use a ViewGroup rather than custom cameras. A ViewGroup works across multiple displays, generating a view per display (and you can have total control of the view frustum) and will, for example, let you move the viewpoint simultaneously across all views. Your displays will need to be set up in Windows as separate displays, though - no Surround / Eyefinity. In P3D 5.1 onwards you can also set a ViewGroup to Single Pass mode which will take advantage of your GPU (provided it's supported) to render the whole view at one time, which will save some (in my experience, about 20%) of the performance penalty from having multiple views.

I believe that if you run the ViewGroup in Cockpit view then you won't see the model at any view angle; but I might be wrong on that. Still, no harm in experimenting. 

Good intro video to the ViewGroup concepts here: P3D View Group Setup - YouTube

Edited July 24, 20214 yr by neilhewitt

2 hours ago, neilhewitt said:

Use a ViewGroup rather than custom cameras. A ViewGroup works across multiple displays, generating a view per display (and you can have total control of the view frustum) and will, for example, let you move the viewpoint simultaneously across all views. Your displays will need to be set up in Windows as separate displays, though - no Surround / Eyefinity. In P3D 5.1 onwards you can also set a ViewGroup to Single Pass mode which will take advantage of your GPU (provided it's supported) to render the whole view at one time, which will save some (in my experience, about 20%) of the performance penalty from having multiple views.

I believe that if you run the ViewGroup in Cockpit view then you won't see the model at any view angle; but I might be wrong on that. Still, no harm in experimenting. 

Good intro video to the ViewGroup concepts here: P3D View Group Setup - YouTube

Hi...thanks for your help.  Didn't know you had to turn Eyefinity off.  I'm using an AMD GPU as a backup for the time being as my NVIDIA GPU died earlier this summer.

Update:

I figured out how to setup the View Group stuff, but I can't get the other screens to work.

I'm entering the right information for the view frustum angles, etc. but I can't get left and right views to work.

After I select the newly made View Group name after right-clicking on the center forward display, the left and right screens go blank, and P3D just sits and waits with a spinning circle.

 

Edited July 28, 20214 yr by TallTanBarbie

4 hours ago, TallTanBarbie said:

After I select the newly made View Group name after right-clicking on the center forward display, the left and right screens go blank, and P3D just sits and waits with a spinning circle.

Did you turn on Single Pass rendering for that group? If so, try turning it off and see if that works. IIRC it doesn't work with all GPUs and I can see how it might lock up your sim like that if you try it with the wrong GPU.

BTW, it can be just as easy to edit the definition files by hand for quick changes, especially if the sim is stuck. The file you want is in c:\program data\lockheed martin\prepar3d v5\viewgroups.xml.

If you didn't have it on, then I'm slightly mystified... this stuff usually just works. I'd delete your viewgroups file and start again. If you can provide the text from the viewgroups.xml file, I can take a look at it.

Edited July 28, 20214 yr by neilhewitt

Yes, I did select that. 

18 hours ago, neilhewitt said:

Did you turn on Single Pass rendering for that group? If so, try turning it off and see if that works. IIRC it doesn't work with all GPUs and I can see how it might lock up your sim like that if you try it with the wrong GPU.

BTW, it can be just as easy to edit the definition files by hand for quick changes, especially if the sim is stuck. The file you want is in c:\program data\lockheed martin\prepar3d v5\viewgroups.xml.

If you didn't have it on, then I'm slightly mystified... this stuff usually just works. I'd delete your viewgroups file and start again. If you can provide the text from the viewgroups.xml file, I can take a look at it.

Yes, I did turn on Single Pass rendering.  I'm using a Radeon Pro Duo Polaris. I turned Single Pass off.  That seems to take care of that problem at least.

https://www.dropbox.com/s/iypbweul8f9b44u/20210728_213444.jpg

This seems to be a bit trickier to set up than X-Plane.  I set the left and right views to be -60° and +60° respectively, but the views don't line up.  Will have to keep working on it.

Here's the file.

 

?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>

<SimBase.Document Type="ConfigurationFile" version="5,2">
    <Descr>AceXML Document</Descr>
    <ViewGroups.ViewGroupSet>
        <ViewGroup>
            <Name>Auto-Fill Desktop</Name>
            <GridSetup>
                <AutoDetect>True</AutoDetect>
                <EdgeOverlap>-2.500000,-2.500000,-5.000000,-5.000000</EdgeOverlap>
            </GridSetup>
        </ViewGroup>
        <ViewGroup>
            <Name>TroikaView120</Name>
            <ViewGroupShape>Spherical</ViewGroupShape>
            <View>
                <Name>LEFT</Name>
                <ViewFrustum>
                    <SideAngles>-30.000000,30.000000,18.000000,-18.000000</SideAngles>
                    <OffsetPBH>0.000000,0.000000,-60.000000</OffsetPBH>
                </ViewFrustum>
            </View>
            <View>
                <Name>CENTER</Name>
                <DisplayID>2</DisplayID>
                <ViewFrustum>
                    <SideAngles>-30.000000,30.000000,18.000000,18.000000</SideAngles>
                </ViewFrustum>
            </View>
            <View>
                <Name>RIGHT</Name>
                <DisplayID>3</DisplayID>
                <ViewFrustum>
                    <SideAngles>-30.000000,30.000000,18.000000,18.000000</SideAngles>
                    <OffsetPBH>0.000000,0.000000,60.000000</OffsetPBH>
                </ViewFrustum>
            </View>
        </ViewGroup>
    </ViewGroups.ViewGroupSet>
</SimBase.Document>

 

 

 

Edited July 29, 20214 yr by TallTanBarbie

UPDATE:

After looking at the .xml file, it seemed to have stuff missing and/or that I didn't select, so I hand corrected it based on the P3D documentation:

http://www.prepar3d.com/SDKv3/LearningCenter/getting_started/view_system/display_configuration.html

This is what I have now.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>

<SimBase.Document Type="ConfigurationFile" version="5,2">
    <Descr>AceXML Document</Descr>
    <ViewGroups.ViewGroupSet>
        <ViewGroup>
            <Name>TroikaView120</Name>
            <AllowZoom>False</AllowZoom>
            <View>
                <Name>LEFT</Name>
                <ViewFrustum>
                    <SideAngles>-30.000000,30.000000,18.000000,-18.000000</SideAngles>
                    <OffsetPBH>0.000000,0.000000,-60.000000</OffsetPBH>
                </ViewFrustum>
            </View>
            <View>
                <Name>CENTER</Name>
                <DisplayID>2</DisplayID>
                <ViewFrustum>
                    <SideAngles>-30.000000,30.000000,18.000000,18.000000</SideAngles>
                </ViewFrustum>
            </View>
            <View>
                <Name>RIGHT</Name>
                <DisplayID>3</DisplayID>
                <ViewFrustum>
                    <SideAngles>-30.000000,30.000000,18.000000,18.000000</SideAngles>
                    <OffsetPBH>0.000000,0.000000,60.000000</OffsetPBH>
                </ViewFrustum>
            </View>
        </ViewGroup>
    </ViewGroups.ViewGroupSet>
</SimBase.Document>

 

This seems to work finally (YAAAY!)  but now I'm getting weird texture effects for the clouds:

https://mega.nz/file/pNhi2KgR#Z_22JLkjGIOhd9uEOwRxWAr5pu56KB_pOXLYQb4Txe8

Another weird problem is that although I have the zoom turned off, it's still on for the center display and I have to adjust it to .54 to get the total view to line up on all three screens.  Is there a way to fix that?

Couple of things - you should put a display id into the LEFT view; the sim will assume display 1 because that's what's left, but better if you specify it explicitly. On the zoom thing, I've heard of this before, but I don't know why it happens. Do you have 'wide view aspect' on? If so, turn it off and see if that fixes the initial zoom. If not, I would suggest dropping a question into the Prepar3d forum directly. I'm pretty sure I've seen someone report this there before but I can't find the post and I can't remember what the solution was. 

I can't see your screenshot in enough detail to see the cloud effects you're talking about - but are they vertical stripes? If so, you have turned on cloud amortization in the EA settings in P3D - turn that off, it doesn't work with ViewGroups. If it's something else, I'll need a higher res screenshot to examine it.

Good that you're getting there. Once it's all sorted it should be reliable. 

9 hours ago, neilhewitt said:

Couple of things - you should put a display id into the LEFT view; the sim will assume display 1 because that's what's left, but better if you specify it explicitly. On the zoom thing, I've heard of this before, but I don't know why it happens. Do you have 'wide view aspect' on? If so, turn it off and see if that fixes the initial zoom. If not, I would suggest dropping a question into the Prepar3d forum directly. I'm pretty sure I've seen someone report this there before but I can't find the post and I can't remember what the solution was. 

I can't see your screenshot in enough detail to see the cloud effects you're talking about - but are they vertical stripes? If so, you have turned on cloud amortization in the EA settings in P3D - turn that off, it doesn't work with ViewGroups. If it's something else, I'll need a higher res screenshot to examine it.

Good that you're getting there. Once it's all sorted it should be reliable. 

I noticed that the first time I got to see the viewgroups.xml file and corrected the missing display number for the first screen.

Yes, the clouds had vertical stripes, and turning off the cloud amortization corrected that problem.

 

https://mega.nz/file/FdwiHDwS#dmMp3yWZ3Hhyr3Noy9EcN6MgIaVdLMhSFnmtfxtUJhM

https://mega.nz/file/FQhART6R#ce-94IoyMOyK9XrQSnZBVbWGW6hzM5m-vNaBzld-LkI

Except for the zoom problem, it seems to be working.

With the view group thing working, it does work (FINALLY!) as a concatenated, single display and you can (a) slew and (b) show cockpit view outside view only mode with the aircraft model  turned off.

View is great, but it runs really slow (5-10fps) with clouds.

I was thinking about getting an NVIDIA 3090, but I'm wondering if it will be fast enough for this.

Here's another question for you:  If you run P3D on three diiferent machines all using the same weather program will the weather be generated the same way but just viewed from a different angle?  I'd like to find out about this before going down the road of getting three exact flight sim machines configured and the pro GPUs and Quadro sync cards ( you need one per computer and they aren't cheap) to synchronise each display so they all fire all at the same time.  Thanks for your help 🙂

Edited July 29, 20214 yr by TallTanBarbie

3 hours ago, TallTanBarbie said:

Here's another question for you:  If you run P3D on three diiferent machines all using the same weather program will the weather be generated the same way but just viewed from a different angle?  I'd like to find out about this before going down the road of getting three exact flight sim machines configured and the pro GPUs and Quadro sync cards ( you need one per computer and they aren't cheap) to synchronise each display so they all fire all at the same time.  Thanks for your help 🙂

With stock non-volumetric clouds, if you are in the same position at the exact same time with the exact same weather and the same settings, the same clouds are displayed in the same places. I can't vouch for add-ons like ASCA, Rex etc. With ASP3D in non-EA mode, it used to work for me. 

With EA, the clouds are generated based on random noise and the random data will be different per machine, so each machine gets different clouds. There was some suggestion that P3D's own multichannel mode is able to sync volumetric clouds, presumably by sharing the random seed data between all machines, but although I asked on the LM forum I have no official answer on that so far, and I haven't tried it myself. Note that to use P3D multichannel, rather than Wideview or similar, you must run P3D Professional Plus Edition which is super-expensive (though you only have to license the host machine; client machines are free). I had a developer sub to Pro Plus for a while to let me try it out without paying the full whack for a Pro Plus license. It works well (or it did in v4, I haven't tried in v5) and it syncs more than Wideview and Opus (AI traffic, all LVARs etc), but it doesn't work with all 3rd-party aircraft, and the main issue is performance. As you mentioned the Quadro cards I guess you've looked into it and know that they recommend hardware GenLock capability, but it isn't *mandatory*. You can run regular consumer GPUs, but what I found was that the frame rates were low, because basically your clients will only run at half of whatever your host machine can handle in terms of FPS since they wait to be signalled over the network that the host has drawn a frame. I was only getting 15 FPS on my clients. I haven't tried it with v5 to see if things have improved, since I have a good setup with Wideview now, but I might one day - it will involve installing Pro Plus over my existing Pro, though, so it's a time-consuming experiment that I'll only do when I'm ready.

I don't have problems with EA but that's because I have two projectors and hence only two views, which both run on one client PC which does nothing but generate the outside view (and gets comparable FPS to the host even with the two views open), while the host PC runs all the console displays and other add-ons like Pro-ATC/X etc. The EA clouds are different between host and client machines, but since I don't use the outside view on the host in the main sim (I have it on VC-only view and use it view and interact with the VC panels), I don't have a problem. 

That zoom thing is weird, though. Is your center view also your main P3D view? That is, it's the screen that P3D starts on? It may have something to do with that. I suppose manually adjusting the zoom every time is a pain but not so much that it stops you using it, but it would be good to get it sorted.