Gibbage

Yes, you read that right! Im releasing my Zenith 701 aircraft for FREE. This is not some average low quality freeware, or a stripped down demo. This is the full product that I was selling for $30 for free. Its fully PBR compatible, has 4K textures and is fully licensed by Zenith aircraft and pilot tested. All for free! All I ask is you consider donating the money you saved on a new aircraft add-on to charity. Im gathering donations to help kids during this Covid 19 crisis. You can find more info on the charity and the download link on the GoFundMe page https://www.gofundme.com/f/flight-simmers-for-education Happy skies, and enjoy flying it! Kevin

Lol. You had me for a bit. Im a small 1 man dev (with some help from Bill) so it was not out of the realm of possibility. On release, the altimeter had 1-8 and two 0's. 😃 Happy flying!

Cant wait to hear your report!

https://store.payloadz.com/details/2618872-software-add-ons-and-plug-ins-zenith_ch701.html

I will check. If it is true, I will fix it right away and be embarrassed. Not quite as bad as when Bill Gates corrected my spelling, but bad enough. True story BTW.

If anyone wants to repaint it, I have a layered Photoshop PSD paint kit with dirt on its own layer for easy painting, and a good UVW layout. https://drive.google.com/open?id=1ovV42YNF29ys-1rJLvv5mTWQTMcXO32U

Hay guys! Just wanted to let you know that my recently released (in October) Zenith 701 is on sale for %50 off! Its a great little LSA and bush aircraft thats officially licensed and very well reviewed! Do some low and slow exploring for as little as $12.50! http://lionheartsimulations.com/zenith-ch701.html You can follow me on Facebook for further news and updates at https://www.facebook.com/Gibbageart/ Kevin "Gibbage" Miller

I was once in marketing. It made me very cynical about everything. Then I went into 3d Art. Now movies dont look very impressive when I try to backwards engineer how the effects were made. Then for the last 18 months I have been doing QA, so now I see nothing but flaws and its hard to see the overall value of a scene without trying to search for its flaws. Occupational hazard.

The key difference is having a separate UV channel for the AO map. UV1 would control how many times the material tiles, and UV2 would control the AO map. UV1 would not need to be all fit into the texture sheet or even organized very well. Again, its only controlling how many times the material is tiled. Stuff can be stacked on top of each other. The problem with using a tiled texture is lack of shadow information, so an area in the foot well would be just as bright as the dash. Thats when you apply a low resolution AO map on another channel. This map will need to be organized and not overlapping. This way things in shadow are darker and have less reflection. This is all stuff thats very possible in P3D if we just had a separate AO map on another mapping channel. This is how you can have a tiled texture (like a leather) but also have unique shadow/AO baked in. Kevin

I spent 18 months working on the car art team at Turn 10 on both Forza 7 and Forza Horizon 4. They use a procedural texture system for all the cars, and after using it, I can see how flight sims can benefit from it. For example, the seats in my Zenith 701 need a 4K texture just so I can have a good fabric looking material. With a procedural system, I can have a tiled 512/512 tiled with an AO map controlling things like dirt and shadows. That way I can just apply a fabric material to the seats, and stitching be a tiled alpha. That way im using a fraction of the texture space for an higher level of detail. If you look at the cockpit of the average aircraft, its comprised of about 5-10 materials. Plastic, fabric, chrome and so on. Instead of painting chrome on toggle switches, you just apply a chrome material to them. Once you have a stock of good shaders, its a very fast system to work in, and efficient. It will be a bit of a learning curve for developers, and I will be sure to make video's explaining it. That is assuming we are getting procedural texture's. It just makes sense with the limitations of Xbox to use it though.

As I said many times in the video, its an "educated guess".

I dont know about the seasons. Its NOT an easy thing to do. Seasons are not the same all over the globe, and you need 4 sets of autogen. If the sim is using FSX as its core, seasons are built into the sim. The question is then if they plan on using the resources needed. Photogrametery will not work well with seasons by default. A new highly advanced shader system would need to be created that would put snow on the roofs of the new scenery since lighting and textures are "baked" into them. I have seen this shader work in other game engines and it calculates the surface angle of polygons. The polygons that is more horizontal get white/snow. Its possible, but will take extra work. It all depends on how much they value that feature on the photogrametery maps. The tree's are also an issue since they are all green blobs even in fall or winter. Again, more resources would be needed to clean up those trees and replace them with autogen trees that already have seasonal packages. What the team is doing is restarting a product that had been developed over 25 years and stopped for 10. Saying that task is monumental is the understatement of a lifetime! What we may get is something with less features than FSX (like seasons) with the expectation of adding them through its lifetime. Game's are seen more as a service. We wont get version 1.0 then 2.0 then 3.0. They will keep improving the core over and over, supported by 3rd party sales, subscription or add-ons. If we dont get seasons on release, I hope its on the roadmap. Kevin

I dont know. I dont have much background in the lighting. From what I saw, they are still very similar to FSX. From what I have seen from XP those seem to be better. But I have not actually flown XP11 yet.

Just like modeling aircraft, sometimes the biggest difficulty is finding a good reference. For cars, we need to find one thats close to bone stock, and fly someone out for a photoshoot. We have had to reject many cars simply because they had way too many modifications. Something like the Renault 5 Turbo hardly ever stays stock for long. Like trying to find a stock Jeep Wrangler. Those things are no longer stock by the time they reach the owners driveway 😉

My job was on the car art team making sure all the cars were accurate, and didnt tank performance. Thats how I know the procedural texture pipeline and how to identify it. My job was to find errors like that and fix it in Forza. BTW, a few ACES members also work on the Forza team. Kevin

Everything is for sale. It all depends on how much. Bing didnt develop the 3D maps. They purchased it from someone for MS use. I forgot the name of the company that did it for Bing, but they could of used Azure to process all the Photogrametery. I may do another video comparing the Bing maps to whats in the video, but its a 90% match so far.

Thanks! I loaded it up into Windows 10 and I can confirm that the maps are a match. They did do some cleaning up around the water, but the base maps ARE from Bing.

3rd party's hardly worry about something like draw calls. As I said in the video, its not a problem until you get multiple aircraft at an airport. It will be an issue on a console though, so its something us 3rd party dev's need to look at in the future if we want to support the next Flight Sim.

Thank you for the clarification.

This is interesting! 3D Bing maps no longer EXIST. I cant find a portal to it, and any software or plugin's that would use it no longer works. This could be a sign of cooperation in that Bing will release the "new" 3D maps with MSFS. This is pure speculation mind you.

Its a good question. Back in the "old" days with Balmer in charge of Microsoft, Bing would never let Flight Sim have maps. Microsoft was rampant with internal struggles! Case in point, the Windows Phone team would not let the Windows Surface team have access to the apps even though they were compatible with both devices. The internal fighting between departments was cultural since each team would fight over a shared pool of money. Flight did NOT use Bing Maps. Satya Nadella has been working hard to remove that culture. I have seen it first hand in that they want departments to cooperate. The simple fact that the opening credits even mention "Azure" is mind blowing considering what I said above. I said in another thread that I doubt it would be Bing, but after looking back at the change of leadership and culture, and that Azure is involved, it may be a shared resource with Bing maps! I will take a look and see if it is.

Its been like 10 years ago. Not bitter. I still have a LOT of old ACES members that I talk with alot. The sim community is very tight nit, so the fact that this surprised all the ACES members (but a few) is telling in its own way. I hope I didnt come off as bitter. Im truly excited about it, and if they support 3rd party's(they said they would), I would love to build aircraft for it. Kevin

I spent 2 years doing work for Forza 7 and Forza Horizon 4. Doing procedural materials helps out the production pipeline, the pixel density, and the texture space. The think it wont do is weathering well. If you have an old warbird, its going to be factory fresh. But at least the leather seats will look like leather without having it occupy a 4K texture sheet just for a single seat.

I thought I called it out as a Carbon Cub in the video? Its a local company here in the PNW and the Flight team had some great access to it for reference. That model was made after I was no longer part of the Flight team.

I would agree. I have a subscription at home and each update brakes Quixel. I stopped updating my Photoshop a while ago. At work (I work at Microsoft) we use CS6 and that is really old in software now a days. I heard rumors they are working on a stand-alone version like Substance, but I have not heard anything for some time on that front.