Visibility/Transparency (Alpha) Control in Real Time

[MSFS 2020] Questions & Community Discussions
1

Hello Microsoft/Asobo,

Would it be possible to control the visibility or transparency of an object in real time using its alpha?

For example, it is possible to control the brightness of an emissive object in real time using the “ASOBO_GT_Emissive_Potentiometer” or “ASOBO_GT_Material_Emissive_Code” templates.

It is also possible to make an object visible or invisible in real time using the “ASOBO_GT_Visibility_Code” template.

However, the latter accepts only Boolean values (0 or 1): the object is either invisible or visible. It is not possible to make an object half transparent in real time by using a value of 0.5 for example.

If the “ASOBO_GT_Visibility_Code” template would accept linear values between 0 and 1 to control the visibility of an object in real time using code, that would be great!

Even better, if there were settable “Material” variables for controlling the most important material parameters in real time, that would be even better.

In Prepar3D, developers have access to Material variables for that purpose and we found them very useful when developing our aircraft models. The “Animated Material” feature of MSFS is not a bad idea, but it works only with the “Standard” material and does not work with alpha values to make an object more or less visible, or transparent, in real time.

Unless we missed something, we didn’t find any way for controling the alpha value of a material in real time with code in MSFS.

Any hints, suggestions?

Thank you,

Alain
Producer
Xtreme Prototypes Development Team
Montreal, Canada

2

I would also like to vote my interest in variable opacity of 3D meshes via code. We saw a glimpse of a muddy bush plane in one of the MSFS 2024 trailers and while we can technically achieve that result currently, it teased a future where we might be able to have variable opacity of those muddy layers. Right now, it’s binary with the visibility other than abusing the VLivery system.

3

Ideally, it would be nice if Animated Materials could control every channel, not just the Emissive value, but also Base Color, Roughness, Metallic, Opacity, even Vertex Color, if possible.

Right now, if we want to create multiple variation of objects that are identical except some color, we need to create a new object with a separate texture or at the very least, a separate .gltf export with different shader parameters set, while we could have sorted it out with a single object and Behaviors that maps variables to various PBR values.

And of course, the ability to do effects like fading, animations, etc. It works very well with the VisualFX editor, so it would be very useful if it could work in 3d models as well.