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BWBriscoe

The most realistic weather with ActiveSky

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Thanks for the info. Just purchased AS cloud art. Used Rex for years but would rather support the great people at HiFi.

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2 hours ago, cyyzrwy24 said:

Question that I have is, since I have SF installed, I am not sure if it interferes with everything now. Or should I remove it completely off my PC and leave only ASP3+ASCA+Envshade?

Unless something has changed, it should make no difference, though I finally uninstalled it myself.

Best wishes.

 


Dave Hodges

 

System Specs:  I9-13900KF, NVIDIA 4070TI, Quest 3, Multiple Displays, Lots of TERRIFIC friends, 3 cats, and a wonderfully stubborn wife.

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3 hours ago, DaveCT2003 said:


What the best or most realistic weather settings are is so subjective that someone is always going to challenge what anyone says.  With that in mind, cyyzrwy24 is correct in my opinion.

This same question has long been asked, so as someone who did a fair amount of flying (and in different areas of the world), I went to work along with a private pilot friend mine and we came up with not only what we believed were the best addons (we worked with and tried them ALL), but the best settings for the addons we decided on.

The guys at REX have always done a great job of marketing and hoping for the best, but the simple fact is that ActiveSky is the finest weather engine I've ever used, and ActiveSkyCloudArt is simply a must have.  If you want to push textures even further, then add the Toga products!

So, ActiveSky P3D. ActiveSky Cloud Art, and Toga's EnvTex and EnvShade is in my opinion, the way to go.  I would provide the files with the settings I use for the AS and Toga products, however short of some work I did earlier this year for the US Navy, I haven't booted up P3D this year due to health reasons and I have no updated my AS or Toga products so the files wouldn't be very useful to you guys.

While I have and run both P3Dv4 and v5, I do not use EA or Volumetric clouds in P3Dv5 (not yet anyway).

I sincerely hope this makes a differernce for those looking to achieve terrific and realistic weather in P3Dv4/v5.

 

Best wishes and a very Happy upcoming New Year!

 

Disclosure:  I believe it's fair to say that I have a long history of providing fair and unbiased opinions regarding anything flight simulatuion related.  As a matter of full disclosure, I worked with the REX Team for several years and Reed Stough was a very good aquitence of mine. Damian Clark at HiFi is a very good aquintence of mine with whom I have worked closely with in the past.  I am not directly affliated with either company.

 

 

 

Do you have Envdir working? Essential to using Evnshade and the last update killed Envdir for me and many others from what I read. Those products are currently on sale at SimMarket and IMHO should be taken down until a fix to Envdir be found.


Vic green

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27 minutes ago, Patco Lch said:

taken down until a fix to Envdir be found.

For what I see, there is no remedy for clouds currently. It seems that we'll never have nice 4.5  clouds anymore, realistically depicted.  Who knows. At least that's what my eye see's it. But for sky and water/sea/ocean I think that Envidir does it job. Or I am mistaken. I remember good times, only ASP3. And everything looked good......or I am mistaken again. 🙂 Or we are used to PTA in the mix...which BTW had real nice impact on lightning and clouds, etc.But who knows where he disappeared or where is playing Pokemon now. Eh Matt....Lot's of fun with that dude.

But has anyone tried just ASP3 and let's say ASCA and nothing else?

Edited by cyyzrwy24

Virtual Air Canada - Alex Luzajic

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BWBriscoe. All of the above are sort of right that is what is realistic is subjective. I now use EA ON and VOLClouds - Ultra with AS providing the weather engine and a few minor tweaks to some settings. A lot of AS will not work with EA on or Vol Clouds, I used to use them all I have tried hard to get many simmers understand the limitations and issues involved with weather depiction in the sim. It may help to make some things clear.

First up until V5 cloud and meteorological phenomena depiction in the sim was based on the use of textures ( painted pictures) which were manipulated by the internal programming, so REX, AS etc would do two things it would provide the data link and extraction of real time weather data from the main weather data centres for real life, the WMO and or NOAH install their textures and send the data to the sim program which would then manipulated the textures dynamically. What you ended up with your texture selection via the AS or REX Cloud and weather menus. The change with V5 is very significant because of the introduction of DX12 and lot of other internal programming rewrites LM introduced EA and Volumetric Clouds which in turn is based on True Sky, at the same time they also introduced the capacity to use the newly released capacity provided by NVIDIA to generate wave motions and hence depict accurate sea states in the sim as well.  Now EA, True Sky (Vol Clouds) and Wave motion are not texture based internal scripting or programming, they are complex mathematical algorithms and equations computing which are in turn manipulating the way the PC via the GPU and hence the monitor displays light pixels on the screen. LM have not invented this process it has been building for some time in the world of computerised or digital film, animation and gaming programs. So the weather, the sky, the light, the clouds is being generated dynamically from mathematical equations and algorithms. This is why it is so hard to change in the sim by the use of addons - textures and a little bit of script work wont do it because it can't because it is too complex and second because the underlying program code is proprietary that is LM licenses it from the people who wrote it. 

Now the sim program still has the capacity to use the older method of textures via AS or REX to display skies and clouds weather etc but to do this you have to basically turn off EA and Vol Clouds, the sim then behaves like older sims did and uses the older method of texture manipulation. You cannot mix an match the new systems with the old either. 

Whether you prefer the look of the older 2D textures based sky-cloud-weather environment is very much a matter of personal choice and I would be the first to say both AS and REX are mature well developed legacy products with very good textures and textures choice and this still works really well with P3D. Peoples idea of what the weather or cloud should look like is quite subjective. 

I no longer use the legacy cloud art or sky textures of REX or AS (I had them both)  but let P3D do it via EA and Vol Clouds the first release of these systems by LM had lots of issues or deficencies which led to a lot of complaints and it has now taken 12 months and 3 releases for LM to refine their side of the program and fix a lot of these issues - such as haze, light, cloud shape, cloud area depiction layers etc. My simple view is that it is not perfect but it is pretty word not allowed good now and can only get better as LM get a better handle on these new programs and the whole issue of computer generated graphics. 

The main problem for realistic weather generation still lies with the nature of the real meteorological data being used by any weather engine. This data has been recorded in a simple abbreviated format for over several centuries now it carries with it a whole bunch of short hand ways of describing weather compounded by the criteria by which met people record cloud and the weather every day, that is they never record it all in the detail you see in the sky when you look at it, sometimes they do come close but the more cloud and the more weather there is means filters are employed so the important stuff is recorded and a lot of minor detail just gets left out. The people who do the forecasts do not need a lot of this stuff because they in turn are using a huge range of data from other sources and instrumentation. So no matter how good the weather engine for the sim there will be many many instances day in day out when it cannot match the data from the met people with the sky and weather outside, it is the way it is. That is your limit to simulated realism! To get the level of simulated realism that would replicate the sky outside as we see it daily would require the computing capacity of several super computers. Cannot do that with a PC on your desk!

That said my personal and hence subjective view is that EA and VOL Clouds are very very good, it is quite realistic it is certainly dynamically much better but it is not perfect, visibility levels and cloud type depiction will remain problematic, because of the changing natural world and the fact that there are days that just are not captured by the weather records and are not reproduced in the sim it can only do an approximation, it is still an approximation but the older texture based legacy look to my eye looks almost cartoonish now, nice but again in the eye of the beholder. My view of is it realistic is simple - I spent 30 plus years of my life in the pointy end of aeroplanes all over the planet. Some days the sim weather is spot on in the way it looks others it can never do, for example any simmer here who is a jet driver will tell you that you can get days where the sky is so clear you can almost see forever it is crystal clear other days it is as murky as a muddy pond. You will see hundreds upon hundreds of variations of cloud formation, stratus and cumuloform daily that the met people do not capture and neither can the sim. What I see now with EA and True Sky is however so good I good never go back to 2D art in the sim. But it is up to you!

 

 

Edited by coastaldriver
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17 minutes ago, coastaldriver said:

What I see now with EA and True Sky is however so good I good never go back to 2D art in the sim

I totally agree. I just can't go back to the old system with textures popping in and out as you fly through them.

The only thing I miss with Truesky is the lack of cirrus cloud and the fact that I very rarely experience multiple

layers of cloud. It always seems to be a single layer of Cumulus or overcast - a bit more variety would be great.

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1 hour ago, coastaldriver said:

You cannot mix an match the new systems with the old either. 

Are you saying that you can’t run as I do with EA on and Volumetric clouds off while using ASP3D and ASCA? If so what do you end up with running it this way?

Thanks in advance 

Joe


Joe (Southern California)

SystemI9-9900KS @5.1Ghz/ Corsair H115i / Gigabyte A-390 Master / EVGA RTX 2080 Ti FTW3 Hybrid w 11Gb / Trident 32Gb DDR4-3200 C14 / Evo 970 2Tb M.2 / Samsung 40inch TV 40ku6300 4K w/ Native 30 hz capability  / Corsair AX850 PS / VKB Gunfighter Pro / Virpil MongoosT-50 Throttle / MFG Crosswind Pedals /   LINDA, VoiceAttack, ChasePlane, AIG AI, MCE, FFTF, Pilot2ATC, HP Reverb G2

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On 12/25/2021 at 10:27 AM, dave2013 said:

I like EA on and volumetric clouds off.

I'm using ENVSHADE and ENVTEX and like them both. 

The only issue I have with EA is that the sun reflection effect is excessive IMO.

Dave

What, may I ask, are YOUR settings for ENVSHADE?  I haven't been able to find the right combination of settings that are satisfying.   

Stan

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5 hours ago, joepoway said:

Are you saying that you can’t run as I do with EA on and Volumetric clouds off while using ASP3D and ASCA?

Yes, you can.

That setup is fine and will 'mix and match' as long as Vol.clouds is off.

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1 hour ago, Sparkrite said:

Yes, you can.

That setup is fine and will 'mix and match' as long as Vol.clouds is off.

Correct. EA is controlling light (day/night etc) AS and ENVSHADE (changing the shaders) can alter the way this works to a point but you will see in the AS that there are some functions where it can only do a little or nothing at all. I guess we have been so used to REX and AS both providing the overall canvas of sky and weather that is difficult to appreciate that there are limits to what they can do with EA and True Sky. 

I also agree that Vol Clouds still needs some work particularly with Cirrus it is better with 5.3 HF1 but it is still not true cirrus. For all low and middle level cloud I think EA and True Sky now produces very realistic results but again there are limits and the multiple layers is another but I cannot see any easy or comprehensive solution to this one if you use real world weather data as the basis for the instruction set via the engine to the sim. The met people simply do not record that detail but work in a heirarchical method of the most to the least cloud etc and most importantly visibility they are not measuring how well you can see but simply how far you can see and what if any phenomena is impacting that visibility (dust or smoke or just water vapour (haze))

Another really critical aspect of all this is the quality of your monitor and the way you have your monitor set up (colouring, hues, balance, contrast etc). Even small shifts here can have a huge difference in the way P3D EA and True Sky reproduce light. It is worthwhile spending a lot of time adjusting your monitor first using good quality images to achieve what looks good to you. You can see that all the time in screenshots in various forums - the way one persons screenshot will be crisp and balanced and another persons has a slightly different colour casting too it, 

And I guess in all this is the issue of biology - males are deficient in the colour perception compared to females (fact) men suffer from colour blindness women do not) so we probably all see colour a little differently and we certainly do not see colour the way women do!

Edited by coastaldriver

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3 minutes ago, coastaldriver said:

males are deficient in the colour perception compared to females (fact)

But only statistically (numbers differ between research, but around 15-25% seems safe).
For instance a test years ago confirmed I see colours better than one of my female friends, who was doing the test with me.

3 minutes ago, coastaldriver said:

men suffer from colour blindness women do not

They also do, just more rarely, due to autosomal recessive inheritance of the X chromosome.

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On 12/25/2021 at 3:04 AM, micstatic said:

ea on for me.  Then I use rex sky force for the clouds.  

EA off plus Rex SF and Active Sky as weather engine.


Intel i7 6700K @4.3. 32gb Gskill 3200 RAM. Z170x Gigabyte m/b. 28" LG HD monitor. Win 10 Home. 500g Samsung 960 as Windows home. 1 Gb Mushkin SSD for P3D. GTX 1080 8gb.

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On 12/26/2021 at 10:29 AM, spilok said:

What, may I ask, are YOUR settings for ENVSHADE?  I haven't been able to find the right combination of settings that are satisfying.   

Stan

I use the default Normal settings of 1.0 for all the categories, except for Cloud Fog Blending and Cloud Brightness Night which I have recently set to 0.9 as I think the clouds and fog are too bright at night.  I may set these even lower in the future.

My issue so far is the very bright sun reflection off the atmosphere when using EA, especially when the sun is nearer to the horizon.  It seems excessive.  I don't know what setting, if any, would reduce this brightness.

Dave


Simulator: P3Dv5.4

System Specs: Intel i7 13700K CPU, MSI Mag Z790 Tomahawk Motherboard, 32GB DDR5 6000MHz RAM, Nvidia GeForce RTX 4070 Video Card, 3x 1TB Samsung 980 Pro M.2 2280 SSDs, Windows 11 Home OS

 

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10 minutes ago, dave2013 said:

I use the default Normal settings of 1.0 for all the categories, except for Cloud Fog Blending and Cloud Brightness Night which I have recently set to 0.9 as I think the clouds and fog are too bright at night.  I may set these even lower in the future.

My issue so far is the very bright sun reflection off the atmosphere when using EA, especially when the sun is nearer to the horizon.  It seems excessive.  I don't know what setting, if any, would reduce this brightness.

Dave

Do you feel that the sim is better overall with ENVSHADE or without it?  I'm not seeing much difference, but I believe my cockpit is darker when I use ENVSHADE.

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I run EA on Volumetric off. AS+ASCA, REX Skyforce. I have Envshade but have not installed with 5.3 yet. 

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