In our FS2024-native Kodiak we use the new Propeller shader. The main issue we are having is that the prop is too opaque when viewed from the front.
The secondary side-effect is that I’d expect to see four “blade shadows” and a transparent disc, but I see four cuts and a solid disc (see image). The back side (painted black) is perfect.
My assumption is that the shader multiplies by the albedo’s Value (in HSV space) to control the opacity of the disc. This makes sense as most props are relatively dark and use white or yellow stripes to denote the edges when spinning.
With the Kodiak, the propeller is light gray with a white tip. As it is “bright”, it becomes opaque when used by the propeller shader.
Am I right in assuming that, if I make the Albedo darker it will make the prop more transparent and improve the problem?
I ran into this as well when playing around with making some new propellers for the SR22T, as I personally like to have a pretty translucent propeller disc. I ended up going pretty much full black in order to achieve this.
Curious, however, I saved my layers in Substance Painter as a Smart Material and repainted the propeller on the XCub with it — which interestingly — yielded a rather different result. The propeller was significantly more translucent than the Cirrus, almost borderline invisible not only in the black areas, but in the white tip stripe + logo areas as well.
I have yet to find any concrete logic on what could cause a discrepancy like this on two propellers painted exactly the same. The only difference between the two to note are;
XCub propeller is a 2 blade, Cirrus propeller is a 4 blade
My Cirrus propeller has no low-poly high-rpm model, nor the faux shadow disc that the SDK talks about. The XCub, if I remember correctly, does.
The latter bullet point I’m not sure would have much effect, however, the first bullet point makes me wonder if the propeller shader takes into account the surface area in some way to calculate an opacity factor aside from the albedo color. I suppose this doesn’t help much to make your propeller more translucent, but just an interesting thing I came across.
Perhaps a value to enter next to the prop node entry in the CFG, or even a transparency factor template of some sort in the XML would be a great addition by the SDK team to better fine tune the propeller visuals as this can become more or less a blocker for cases like yours where the propeller is not dark/black.
Now that I think about it.. the must be something else that the overall system is taking into effect, considering that the spinner is not translucent, yet the propeller blades are. Being all one node, I’m now curious as to how it discerns what should be translucent vs opaque!
In my case above for the XCub, the spinner and propeller blades are the same albedo color, just different roughness/metallic/norm values.
