Comments on: Making Specularity Work For You

By: Chris

Chris — Wed, 27 Jul 2011 16:32:41 +0000

More importantly, you need to do something about the constant ambient illumination that is haunting XP 9. Virtually all contours are lost in the parts not facing the sun. And I hazard the guess, normal maps are not going to show in these locations either.

I read somewhere you already do lighting in linear space. Well then you could add some skylight no?

By: vonhinx

vonhinx — Sun, 24 Jul 2011 12:08:21 +0000

Maybe if you included a pikkie of the unhacked view plus both textures it would make more sense to the many unschooled in the finer points of specular maps. Otherwise what looks and shines like guano….

By: krz9000

krz9000 — Thu, 21 Jul 2011 21:17:20 +0000

In reply to Ben Supnik. 6 renders from around the object of interest. i don't think this would be needed to update often, could be done as a very low priority job. i have red that racing games do this,...e.g. 2003 project gotham 2 comes to mind.

By: Ben Supnik

Ben Supnik — Thu, 21 Jul 2011 19:34:31 +0000

In reply to krz9000.

We will not have dynamic environmental reflections in 10.0.
We _might_ have them in 10.x. It’s something we are interested in and it’s on the short list for the next set of ren features, but there’s no guarantees of course.

I think they’ll be variably expensive based on ren settings…lots of ways to dial them up and down.

I don’t think we’ll do static cube map reflections – what would you bake into the cube map?

By: krz9000

krz9000 — Thu, 21 Jul 2011 19:33:04 +0000

will xplane 10 have cubemap reflexions or is this considered too expensive? (specular-maps are a very oldschool way to fake “reflexions, while raytraced reflexions are a thing of the future, cubemap relexions that get generated every few seconds are a nice way to create great looks with reasonable computation)

By: Steve in Tucson

Steve in Tucson — Thu, 21 Jul 2011 17:06:59 +0000

Mad detail on that X-15. Love the way X-Plane can crunch polys, and Javier knows how to sling ’em. Very, very happy that grayscale png’s will be used as specular maps in X-Plane 10. Fiddling with the alpha of a normal map is not for the faint of heart, even with a decent art proggie like Photoshop. What will the attribute command be, Ben? Has that been established?

By: Ben Supnik

Ben Supnik — Thu, 21 Jul 2011 15:26:08 +0000

In reply to Chris Hallam. Not at all. In this picture I have temporarily hacked X-Plane to reveal an aspect of the authoring process for the education of third party authors. This is not something we will ship, it has no use to users. It just lets authors see how plane is built, sort of like an X-Ray.

By: Chris Hallam

Chris Hallam — Thu, 21 Jul 2011 15:19:22 +0000

did you mean users can choose to fly with a “gray scale” colored aircraft vs the regular colored textured version? who would want to fly gray planes all the time?