I have some really nice external camera views on my smaller GA aircraft - it is often a camera that sits out just behind and above the wing - it provides a really great alternative external view to just the simple spot type of view.

But is annoying the heck out of me though is that I cannot - no matter what I try - eliminate the significant z-fighting that occurs to scenery ahead of the camera when using this specific type of view. Reading all the Prepar3D documentation on the subject, I have tried every possible iteration of camera types and clip plane overrides in order to resolve the issue but it simply does not work. The only thing that does "work" is to change the clip mode to normal and then move the camera further back (to behind the tail of the aircraft) so that the nearest parts of the airframe are not clipped when the camera operates according to its internally defined algorithm. Then I get exactly the same (minimal to non-existent) z-fighting that I see from inside the virtual cockpit.

But I just don't understand it - how does Lockheed Martin provide a default camera view from inside a virtual cockpit that does a universally supremely good job of eliminating z-fighting in scenery objects ahead of the aircraft yet when I try to use any external camera - normal, minimum, spot - it makes no difference - with and without near and far overrides - I get the horrible z-fighting with a camera in this type of position (so external to the aircraft but close to the airframe itself).

If I did not know any better, I might think that Lockheed Martin uses a different (less precise) z-buffer precision (perhaps for performance reasons?) for any camera that "knows" it's origin is from the exterior of the aircraft versus any camera that "knows" it's origin is from within the aircraft (since I have never seen z-fighting to anywhere near this extent from any interior positioned camera where I do not specifically define the clip mode in the camera.cfg or aircraft.cfg file.

Does anyone have any tangible insights here since I'm basically resigned to just redefining these external cameras as normal clip mode and then moving them sufficiently far back from the airframe to avoid any clipping (since as soon as I go fiddling using any near and or far clip overrides at all, the z-fighting just starts all over again).

For anyone else having this issue, after two days of experiments I concluded that there is nothing the end-user can do in terms of clip mode types or overrides to resolve this. I ended up changing the clip modes to normal without overrides as that is the best setting for the simulation in order to mitigate the z-fighting issues. I then moved the cameras sufficiently far back from the rear of the airframe so as to never clip.

Edited January 19Jan 19 by JonP01