Turbofans animation with the new shader - Windmill

[MSFS 2024] Bug Reports Aircraft
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1

Version: SU3

Frequency: Consistently

Severity: High

Context: in flight

Bug description:

The turbofans blades when using the new shader for animations is great, however one problem is the “wind mill” animations, it seems it is not taking in consideration the direction of the wind to perform the windmill animation when sitting on the tarmac.

The expectation based on real life data I have from pilots of Phenom 300E are as follow:

  • Crosswinds should not windmill the EMB551E engines, they stay still under these circumstances.
  • Wind from the front, should spin the engine in the orientation configured for normal operations.
  • Wind from the back, should spin the engine in the opposite direction configured for normal operations.

Currently the engines using the new shader are always spinning on the same direction regardless of the wind direction.

It is important to clarify why having the spinning in opposite direction is important, private jets and many other types of fan engines, are required to always start facing the “wind”, the reason is because otherwise, due to the opposite spinning severe problems can occur when starting the engines, for example:

  • ITT will raise faster! leading to hung starts or failed starts.
  • On some engines this causes fuel to touch hot parts, leading to fires.
  • Some FADEC Computers detect these situations and prevent engines from being started upon these conditions.

The visual indication of the fan blades spinning correctly helps ground crews to clear engines starts, or pilots to proceed or turn the aircraft facing the wind.

Repro steps:

Take the 737-Max, cold and dark no engine covers, set lots of wind and move the wind around and you will notice how the windmill is always anti-clockwise regardless of the wind coming from the back of the engine, also when coming as crosswind, they should not move really.

I asked the operators of the Phenoms (since I am making this aircraft) and it is the same for Preator 600, so improving this will also help you guys to get that product more realistic :slight_smile: .

Best,
Raul

1 Like
2

Hi Raul,

I’ll give my 2 cents on this but not sure if this will work or not for FS2024. Would it be possible to have a separate fan blade mesh tied to your own code that only appears when the engines are off. Then you could tie that to custom code to control the wind milling. Then when the engines are started, your custom fan mesh disappears and the FS2024 mesh will appear. This is just a thought though as I have not tried this out. Only problem I see is a potential popping effect when the transition happens from the custom fan to the 2024 fan mesh. We have our custom wind milling working in 2020 but I am just getting up to speed on 2024. The only other option is to just port the 2020 code logic over into 2024 which is last resort for us. If you are able to try this out and if it works, please let us know :slight_smile:

Thanks,
Shervin

3

To be honest the best approach is for the shader to get this running properly, then all airplanes in tne ecosystem will benefit and we have less things to worry about and code.

Asobo already has tagged the bug as logged.

If i try switching meshes and do what you asked, the transition is not seamless as the material shader will spin down / up based in multiple things and you will never match the rotation it is doing perfectly to perform the swap.

Either you do it all and don’t use the new 2024 material or you use the new material.

I prefer the animations of the new material, lighting hits fans perfectly, not as a blurry disk, animations are less jerky, incredibly fluid, and many other benefits.

I am confident asobo will get the windmill nailed down instead.

Best,
Raul

4

Fair enough my friend. Looking forward to the fix from Asobo as yes this would one less thing to worry about and code. Take care.

1 Like