Premier Aircraft Design "Workaround" for VC

falcon409

falcon409

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Staff member
If you're a fan of PAD's aircraft and have tried to use them in P3D then you found that the placeholders projects an ugly black rectangle in the VC obscuring the panel and just about everything else. I had contacted Bob May about it and he confirmed that as the problem. Today I got the following e-mail from Bob referencing that earlier e-mail conversation we had regarding a possible fix:

Hi Ed,

further to our conversation below I have (accidentally) found a work around for the black panel squares and the black props viewed from the VC cockpit.
In the display options there is a check box labelled “ mipmap vc panels” If this is unchecked the VC panel displays perfectly in P3D v2 and also if you ‘lean forward’ enough you can see transparent prop disks. This works for all the PAD models I have tried in P3D.
Since the VC was not hi-res to start with the quality seems to be not affected.

Regards,
Bob.

As a footnote to this, I'm pretty sure that box was always unchecked in my setup when I was seeing the black rectangles. I don't like mips and delete them any time I can, wherever I find them being used (on aircraft). So I'm not sure this is an "across the board" fix. However, if it works for other. . .great. . .give it a try.
 
Interesting post, sadly PAD are now looking their age however, unless some clever person can inject some life into them. I particularly like the Dorniers (jet & prop).
 
Thanks for the info, Falcon, I'll have to try that out.
Incidentally, I find mipmaps seem to work better in P3d than they did in FSX. I always used to remove them in FSX, but now I add them to P3d aircraft if they're not there. (external textures only, not VC ones.)
 
Naismith said:
Interesting post, sadly PAD are now looking their age however, unless some clever person can inject some life into them. I particularly like the Dorniers (jet & prop).
Click to expand...
Very true. . . .they have decent FDE's based on the aircraft type and someone with talent as a texture artist could probably pump new life into the exteriors and VC's but beyond that, all was lost with the passing of Jean-Pierre and Barry who both passed away within a year of each other. Bob said that all source codes were lost so nothing can be done to update any of the models. Too bad.
 
Just got a follow-up from Bob May that I feel compelled to pass on. Even though production of new aircraft ceased after the passing of Jean-Pierre and Barry, the PAD sight still boasts approx. 600 visits per day and 15,000 downloads per month. Pretty impressive numbers that show the longevity of the aircraft those gentlemen produced over the years. I hope somewhere they're smiling at the thought.
 
I'm not a P3D user... not yet, anyway, but since the subject is PAD aircraft I did want to say something. PAD really filled a niche in the FS9 and FSX communities. They released aircraft that a great number of people wanted, but no one else was making. Their aircraft got better and more refined with almost every new release. The Beech 99 was one of the last and one that I fell in love with. I love it so much that I crafted a new set of panel lines and weathering layers for it and Bob added my work to the paint kit. The B99 was a great release, the only thing that would have made it any better would have been back light modeling for the instrument panel. Sadly, there will be no further updates nor any new releases from PAD, but they still fill a void in our communities.
 
Just to confirm, I tried this with an another aircraft that had the same issue and the "uncheck Mipmap VC panels" method works. :encouragement:
 
Canadair CL215

I have almost the same in the windows of the VC-cockpit at Massimo Taccoli's Canadair CL215 for FSX.
It is a grey-green nontransparency windows in the VC-cockpit
2D cockpit is OK.

Any work around for P3DV2?
 
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