Too Much Reflection in Windshield

Hello Microsoft/Asobo,

The “Glass” material has an optional parameter for (supposedly) reducing the amount of reflection (“Glass Reflection Mask Factor”).

However, the “Windshield” material has not.

We are using the “Windshield” material for our windshield and we would like to reduce the amount of reflections from the instrument panels.

We tried tweaking the roughness/metallic parameters and including roughness/metallic textures with different values without success.

We found the (default) reflection on the windshield acceptable but a bit too exaggerated.

Any suggestions?

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On a similar topic, we tried to reduce the glass reflection on some objects that have the “Glass” material by tweaking the “Glass Reflection Mask Factor” value, but it seems to have no effect. We tried the material with and without roughness/metallic textures and nothing changed. We were always getting full reflection on the glass, even at a higher degree than when using the “Windshield” material.

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One last thing: Is there a way to remove the rain effect when using the “Windshield” material (our windows and windshields have two glass panes, and we don’t need rain on the inner/interior glass pane)? We tried reducing the “Rain Drop Scale” parameter to zero (0) but it had no effect.

Thank you.

Alain
Producer
Xtreme Prototypes Development Team
Montreal, Canada

I can help you with glass materials.

First of all, this page from the documentation describes the material parameters.
https://docs.flightsimulator.com/html/Asset_Creation/3DS_Max_Plugin/Materials.htm#glass

The “Glass” material has a special environment map and a diffraction value. The “Windshield” material has special properties for rain and icing.

But the standard material can produce a perfect glass texture by itself. The key is the base color value which can have an alpha value. The alpha should be very low, on the order of 0.01 to 0.05. The roughness should also be very low. Under 0.10 for sure. Lower roughness will result in sharper reflections. But too high roughness makes the glass blurry.

For two-layer windshields, set the inside facing mesh to “Windshield” material and the out facing mesh to a standard material with very low alpha.

Hello Sal1800,

Thank you very much for your insights!

Unfortunately, we cannot use your suggestion for our model.

Our windshield has two glass panes separated by a rubber-like seal inside a metal frame. On the real airplane, there is only one thick plexiglass windshield, but it is simulated in our interior model by two glass meshes with normals pointing inward (towards the pilot). Our cabin windows also have two glass panes that are more obvious than in our windshield.

The reason we are using two glass meshes in our interior model is because we want rain and ice to be visible on the outer pane only, not on the inner pane (the one closer to the pilot inside the cockpit) which would be unrealistic. Both panes also have their own sets of fingerprints, scratches, etc.

If we use the “Windshield” material for the inner pane mesh, rain would be visible on the inner glass pane. We want rain to be visible on the outer pane only (that has the “Windshield” material applied to it).

Our exterior model only has an outer glass pane with normals pointing outward. It also has the “Windshield” material applied to it because we also want rain and ice to be visible when in an outside view. We’ve added a template to make this glass mesh only visible when in an exterior view. Similarly, the interior model’s outer glass pane is only visible from an interior view.

This works well in our model and the result is what we wanted to achieve and is very realistic.

Now, my original post is referring to the “Windshield” material having a bit too much reflection in our cockpit with no option to reduce amount of reflection like in the “Glass” material.

We still need to use the “Windshield” material for the outer glass pane and are considering using it also for the inner glass pane because it is less reflective than the “Glass” or “Standard” materials (tweaking the “Glass Reflection Mask Factor” parameter in the “Glass” material seems to have no effect, etc.).

Unfortunately, when using the “Windshield” material for the inner glass pane, we also get rain on the inside of the airplane and there seems to be no way to remove it, even with the “Rain Drop Scale” parameter set to zero (0).

To summarize, these are what we would like to achieve:

  1. To reduce the level of reflection in the “Windshield” material
  2. To set the “Windshield” material so there is no rain effect displayed
  3. To reduce the level of reflection of the “Glass” material

We do not understand why the “Glass Reflection Mask Factor” parameter in the “Glass” material does not seem to work, and why reducing the “Rain Drop Scale” parameter set to zero (0) in the “Windshield” material does not stop the rain from being displayed. And why there is no way to reduce the amount of reflection in the “Windshield” material.

We would be very pleased to read from Microsoft/Asobo about this.

(Of course, we are also working on a workaround to achieve similar goals if there are no other more practical solutions.)

Hope this helps everybody.

Alain
Producer
Xtreme Prototypes Development Team
Montreal, Canada

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