Adding shine to portovers?

falcon409

falcon409

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Staff member
I know this has been discussed before. . .I believe Milton even chimed in on a thread, puzzled by the inability to add a shine to some of his models when moved to P3D. I've been toying with the Spartan Executive, enhancing the VC panel (or tried to, lol) and updating the exterior to 4096x4096 textures. The original was a beautiful polished aluminum but once added to P3D it became a muddy gray mess. . .hence the repaint. Just wondering if anything new has been discovered to add a shine?

Note: No the VC isn't clickable, but there are just some airplanes that are too good, too much fun to fly to leave them behind. The Spartan is one of those Classics!
 
I also wanted to shine up the chrome on the MAAM SIM DC3 for a repaint I did recently. Looks like it may not be possible.

Newer models have a bunch of Specular.dds Files and Fresnel maps, that I guess are linked as specular materials into the models, by the developers during the Gmax modelling stage. Without those, shining up these surfaces may be a problem in newer DX10/DX11 capable models.

Other than developers updating their models in GMAX to make use of these capabilities, I would also be keen to know if there is another workaround. As you say, some of these old birds, even without clickable VCs, are still just too good to leave behind, and no replacements are available for many types yet.

Rob
 
falcon409 said:
I know this has been discussed before. . .I believe Milton even chimed in on a thread, puzzled by the inability to add a shine to some of his models when moved to P3D. I've been toying with the Spartan Executive, enhancing the VC panel (or tried to, lol) and updating the exterior to 4096x4096 textures. The original was a beautiful polished aluminum but once added to P3D it became a muddy gray mess. . .hence the repaint. Just wondering if anything new has been discovered to add a shine?

Note: No the VC isn't clickable, but there are just some airplanes that are too good, too much fun to fly to leave them behind. The Spartan is one of those Classics!
Click to expand...

Why do you use the FS9 Spartan instead of the FSX-native one ? :)

daube_image2111.jpg
 
Roger said:
Banana Bob's env map?
Click to expand...

Exactely. I consider it as a mandatory addon, honestly.
The fact is that a lot of repaints are depending on the default FSX/P3D envmap file for the metal shine. Very few repaints have their own envmap.
By replacing the default envmap by BananaBob's one, most metallic aircrafts get a very nice metal shine.
I don't know if that would work with FS9 planes, though...
 
Daube said:
Why do you use the FS9 Spartan instead of the FSX-native one?
Click to expand...
Did a search and the original one done by FSNorthwest isn't available, their website is gone. I did a search on our SOH download site and found one that purports to have all the changes made up to this point with repaints by Capt. Keith. . .several options for vc panels and so on. . .tons of repaints, many that appear to be polished aluminum in places, but none that displays like what you show in your image. I'm assuming that was shot in P3D_V2.4? If you have a model that looks like that in the latest version of P3D, I'd like to know where you got it.
 
That shot was in FSX actually, I did it quite some time ago. I didn't check in P3D yet.
I still have the package from FSNorthWest. Check you PMs.
EDIT: ah wait, I have a problem with my uploaded file....
 
Yes it was converted to FsX and with permission I added a number of repaints by various people, again with their permission as the texture map had changed from Milton's original. The bare metal paints show lots of shine in FsX.
 
Roger said:
Banana Bob's env map?
Click to expand...

I was thinking about the envmap when I reinstalled Prepar3D 2.4. Is it better than default?
-Better yet, what actually works? My main concerns are when using HD. I like HD better, but overall it seems too dark to me. If we had an option to adjust HD via a slider, that would be nice.
 
That's better, just have to figure out why the wheels are chrome now. . .none of the other liveries have this problem. . .just mine, lol
 
Found the problem. The texture I used for the Hi-Res external work was from the original FS9 aircraft apparently and the wheels and various parts were on separate textures. The FSX version combines all that into the fuse_t texture. Did a bit of cut and paste and all's well now.
 
Glad you could finally get that model :)
Since you're working on a repaint, could you check why the front windows are so dark in the VC view ?
 
Daube, I think all I did was adjust the alpha on the two glass textures (glass_t & Xglass_t), making it darker.
 
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