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..
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