Windshield reflection intensity not working

[SimbolFSReborn]

Version: 1.16.23

Frequency: Consistently

Severity: Blocker

Marketplace package name: NA

Context: in flight

Bug description:

I am unable to limit the reflection of the interior windshield for an aircraft, not matter what I do, setting even a black texture for RGB on the Windshield material in 3DS results in no difference for the glareshield reflections inside the cockpit.

This causes avionics to be always too relfective, outside of how it looks IRL, my plan was to set a RGB Mask to limit the reflections on the front windshield on the affectes areas, but not matter what I do, they never change.

Black texture or full RED has no difference, reflection mask value of 0.0 or 2.0 in the 3DS material has no difference either, is like this is totally being ignored..

My testers find it very hard to flight at night, we have to correct this please advise what we can do.

**Repro steps:**
Set a texture for Reflection in 3DS, try to mask a part of the windshield to avoid reflections.

Best,

Raul

[Yasmine]

Hello,

I am not sure to understand your issue, is it the R of the comp texture you are changing ? Have you tried to change the value of the roughness ? The reflection (R) parameter influence only the ambient occlusion. The reflection of the object is influenced by the roughness.

[SimbolFSReborn]

Hi Yasmine,

Thanks for your response and for your help. The documentation implies, we can control the “amount” of reflection being done by the windshield on the surface: Windshield And Windows

FlightSim Material Textures

However this is not what is happening, I am changing the RED channel and the reflections remain at full strength for the windshield regardless of the texture or the manual parameter in 3DS.

Changing roughness is not use for windshield as it makes the windshield like a “frosted glass”, blurred, and refracted, instead of controlling the amount of “reflection” for the windshield like the documentation is promising.

For clarification, other materials, when I change the AO, I can control the amount of occlusion, and as per documentation, the more white the channels is, more reflections from outside occurs, the darker the R channels is, more internal cubic reflections occurs, this works fine for standard, geodecals, materials, etc.

However for Windshield, the R channels appears to not have any effect, more over as per current documentation, my hope was to be able to “tone down” the amount of internal reflections on the windshield via a texture, where the bottom of the windshield would be fully reflective, and the top, less reflective so the avionics are not there so intense at night. This is what is going wrong, so either the documentation is mistaken, and we are unable to control the amount of reflections or the R channels is not doing what it is supposed to do in the MSFS shaders and renders for Windshields.

Does this helps to understand the issue better?

All the best,
Raul

[Yasmine]

Ok i see the issue, from what i see in the shader, the reflection is connected to the AO. Our tech-arts told me to check if you have the right cubemap set in your aircraft: cockpit.cfg ?

[SimbolFSReborn]

Yes, the right cube map is set.. we got reflections working all over the interior surfaces (the Closed Cockpit).

The question to the Tech-Arts is, how we limit the reflections for windshield materials? in terms of intensity, like the documentation explains… that is what is not working for me.

All the best,
Raul

[Yasmine]

Hello,

The “Red” channel of the “Reflection Roughness Metalness texture” only affects reflections of the environment cubemap. It cannot unfortunatly affect the intensity of screen space reflections which is the reflections you have in your cockpit.

We will correct the documentation.

Thank you

[SimbolFSReborn]

Understood,

in that case, anything users can do to reduce the glare shield reflection intensity inside the cockpit, MSFS Settings or something? So I can guide future customers when we release, as it stands is too strong and inevitably they will ask me for solutions, etc.

Thanks for all the help,

Raul

[SimbolFSReborn]

I sent some shots via private content group, so you guys understand me much better.

Best,
Raul

[Flysimware]

This needs to be addressed. A canopy shape bubble windshield is extremely bad as the gauges at night are filling it like a movie theatre.

[BlackbirdSims]

The reflections are way overblown at night, especially in a tight cockpit (IE a fighter aircraft, single seater or as above in a bubble canopy). We have several projects with dual layered glass and this is problematic. The only other option is to remove the glass layer which kills the rain and frost effects. Regular glass also exhibits the same issue. Is there any solution at all?

[SimbolFSReborn]

Bump..

Any planned improvements with SU5 / SU6? This is a issue keep being raised by my real pilots testers and my beta team. It not allowing me to set the correct height for the pilot view as per real as it would flood the windshield with reflections that would kill the visibility outside, specially when you put charts on the PDF avionics.

Obviously makes users uncomfortable, and we do need a way to tone this down either via dev tools we can use or user settings.

Best,

Raul

[ZachB]

Just came across this as well. The SDK claims;

“The red channel (R) is used to determine the visibility of the reflections on the windshield glass where 1 would be fully reflective, and 0 would be non-reflective”…. “These values are linear.”

However, I can echo the above posts in that this acts as more of an “on-off” switch, rather than a sliding scale of reflectivity. Specifically, the “on-off” switch is any red (R) channel value greater than zero.

As soon as the value of the red (R) channel goes from #000000 → #010101 (or 0.0021 → 0.0022 in the AO/R channel in Substance Painter), the “on-off” switch occurs and the reflection goes from a smooth, semi-satin finish to a fully gloss-reflective visual with the cubic reflection being 100% visible.

With only a few available cubemap options for the cockpit, it would be great if this reflection value could be fixed and/or made into a sliding scale between (R)=1 and (R)=0, to minimize the harshness of the cubic reflection with “in-between” values. As Raul said above, a value of (R)=1 is rather unpleasant to look at for the end user.

I’ve applied this material to a test mesh in the cockpit at dusk time to create a good side-by-side comparison to supplement this;

← (R)=0 (R)=1 →

← (R)=0 (R)=1 →

Thanks,

Zach