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Simbol avatar image
Simbol asked Simbol commented

WindShield Material as 3DS Max

Hello,

I am struggling to understand the concept of the windshield material using 3DS, the documentation indicates this material should be set as windshield + use a blend setting.. however the SDK example DA62 it shows it using windshield + mask setting.. so there is a miss mach between example and documentation.. which one should be used?

In addition, nothing specify / explains if we should create a double sided or single side geometry to set be used by the windshield material. The DA-62 example seems to be a single a side geometry with back face culling enabled inside 3DS.. I tried to replicate this configuration for testing purposes and what happens is this: You get the windshield rain effect only outside the aircraft, while the inside shows no glass rendering.. if you flip the Normals inwards , then you get the effects working correctly inside the aircraft but all glass reflections externally are lost. This doesn't happen to the DA-62 so clearly something is missing on the documentation or the example is done differently?.

In addition, the documentation (screenshot below) mentions the windshields materials also supports Vertex Alpha values. Which I think it was applied to the DA-62 example looking at the rendering inside 3Ds results. However the documentation explains the values for the Vertex Colors go from 0 to 1 but 3DS only supports integers from 0 to 255 for Vertex colours therefore how you are supposed to set these values when 3DS doesn't allow you to enter them? (for example, let's say I want half intensity for scratches, so I want the Red channel to be at 0.5 on some faces, this is not possible since the value 0.5 is invalid, it is either 0 or 1 or 2 to 255..)

When you open the DA-62 example, and you select a windshield poly or face, the vertex colors are showing no values, looks like they were set somehow between 0 and 1.. and 3DS then doesn't display this data, so I am also unable to study how this was done..

1624435235376.png


Somehow I think the workflow for Windshield for 3DS is not explained correctly and as a result you can get very weird result inside MSFS ( things like double scratches, rain drops artefacts, etc).. there is lots of guess work here, so any extra information would be very much appreciated.

Kind Regards,

Simbol


aircraft3dsmaxtutorial
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FlyingRaccoon avatar image
FlyingRaccoon answered Simbol commented

Hello Simbol,

Regarding the vertex colors, the documentation seems outdated.
@Nocturne will have a look at this.

Colors are set with values between 0 and 255 and this is visible in the DA62 sample:

1625586936460.png

Regards,
Sylvain


1625586936460.png (64.4 KiB)
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Simbol avatar image Simbol commented ·
Hi Sylvain,


Perfect.. I managed to get this done inside 3DS via VertexPaint modifier. However I was not sure if a color between 0 to 255 would be aceptable.. Thanks for confirming this is the case.

Regards,
Simbol

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StevenPearce avatar image
StevenPearce answered Simbol commented

To have windshield effects on both interior and exterior you should have the geometry in both the interior and exterior model, with the normals facing in the respective direction. In the interior only I'm only putting the windshield windshield node in LOD 0, because you will get some flickering glitches if both are viewed at the same time from the exterior.

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Simbol avatar image Simbol commented ·
Thanks for this Steven, so the only question remaining is.. how we use the Vertex Colors on 3DS because currently it seems we cannot..


Regards,
Simbol

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