The interior of the MSFS 2020 compiled aircraft appears completely different in MSFS 2024. Μetalness and rougness are totally washed out. I suspect this is due to the new lighting rendering in MSFS 2024. I’m not sure if this is related to materials, textures, or both.
The question is: Will this be addressed in MSFS 2024, or will it remain as it is now?
If it remains the same, is there anything I can do to make the aircraft’s interior appear identical? If so, what should I do?
With all the changes that occurred between 2020 and 2024, it’s not straightforward to explain the difference between 2 pictures.
What you can do to help comparing:
Make sure you have comparable graphics settings, and especially the new “Dynamic Settings” is disabled, as it can downgrade the rendering quality significantly.
Take screenshots in identical location, time and weather conditions
Use the DevMode “Channel display” option to compare channels individually (Normals, AO, albedo, metal, roughness, etc…)
Focus on a specific aspect of the result. You mentioned roughness and metalness. Using the option I mentioned above, are the dedicated channels different between 2020 and 2024?
My feeling is that most differences come from the indirect lighting. The reflection cubemap are handled differently and a lot of the parts that used to reflect bright outside colors are now reflecting interior, which gives more dull colors.
But that’s just a theory and I’ve requested a bit more info on cubemaps and the role of the interior mask so that we can share more details in the SDK documentation.
After investigations, the difference in the debug channel display was explained by the wrong color space they are displayed with. The values are identical though and the channel display will be fixed in a future update.
So what you have in MSFS 2024 is the expected result and the difference with 2020 is explained with the changes made to lighting.
To illustrate this, I created some material spheres in the Da62 SDK sample to compare how they look in 2020 vs 2024.
Note how ambient occlusion plays a big role. Whether an object is lit by interior or exterior lights and environment depends on an interior mask that is generated from AO.
All parts with AO < 0.5 considered interior only and there is then a gradient for values in the [0.5;1.0] interval.
