HDR lighting comparison
HDR is coming to future FlightGear, and it makes things look a lot different.
While its is available in the current nightly builds, its a pain to get it working and its nowhere near stable enough to be useful yet. But It shows huge promise
Here is a simple comparison. Dusk from my local.
Standard FG with the best of the options in use.
And now Dusk with HDR enabled
Comments
I think it looks really nice, the sky in particular is absolutely stunning and you could easily get a sky looking like that. The way it reflects on the ground textures probably needs a bit of work but I think it's making some huge progress and will be a very welcome addition to FG.
Sadly it doesn't seem to want to run on my machine.
What do we need to do to get our aircraft ready for it?
The shaders we use for fuselage and glass etc all need properly testing.
Fuselage one looks to be doing its job, but the glass one is a mystery. we use the same glass shaders in all out stuff yet so glass looks like this on the gazelle, and on other aircraft it will be perfectly fine so Im not sure if its actually down to how the glass object was made or if its the shader at fault.
It looks so good, really adds to the sim.
CJ
OrbitalMartian
Callsigns: G-ORBI
Yeah the HDR shader is awesome and gorgeous, so far the only FGUK aircraft compatible with HDR is the UH-1H that I modified for PBR.
Here are some pics of it:
I agree with everything that has been said.
HDR is in the development phase and I don't think it's ready yet.
Stu the glass shader contains png files maybe you can deactivate the png. Or it could be that it is related to the unwrapping of the window objects. Maybe the windows need to be unwrapped to a texture exactly like the fuselage. But.... : )....Cyber has the answer for the glass....but he doesn't say it. OOOOOHHHHHH...... secret.
The glass in HDR is rendered differently than in ALS so that's why you have to apply an image texture to the transparent objects in blender. With that you can change the colors of the glass, normal maps and ORM maps. I think that's what you were referring to.
Usually the reason why glass appears white on models is because the shader hasn't been set to model-pbr-transparent and a texture hasn't been assigned to the transparent object in blender.
but applying a texture to the glass will affect compatibility with the FX used in current FG versions
Yeah, for now the aircraft models that use PBR are only compatible with the next versions, so you have to have two versions, one with PBR and one without.
Well, in that case we do nothing until we find a way of making our aircraft work with both.
They said that you could not have a combined ALS and Rembrandt lights on an aircraft, but we did it and we have been told many other things wont work, but we figured it out, so this needs figuring out too. But not until we can actually run it and test properly.
Yup, agreed. At least we can make aircraft PBR for testing purposes and if anyone wants to try out our aircraft in HDR but we wont release any official version until we can combine ALS and HDR compatibility.