MSFS20 After exporting a material in the MSFS scenery package is no longer transparent.

[Stefan01]

MCX 1.6.0.9a 03-Jan 23
Good day,
I have created a library with buildings for P3D. The buildings have transparent windows.
The export worked fine except for one small thing. Many thanks to the developer of MCX. Without this tool I would not be able to do this.
My problem, after the export the windows are no longer transparent.
I have attached a PDF with screenshots. The pictures 1 and 2 show the parameters of the affected material, left before the conversion right after the conversion. I have marked the deviations in color.
If I open the converted modellib with MCX and change the following 2 values for the material (picture 3):
Alpha coverage: from False to True
Is PBR material: from True to False
the window in MCX becomes transparent again.
My question is how can I save this change or how do I have to proceed so that I have transparent windows after the conversion to MSFS.
Thanks for the help
Stefan

 

[arno]

Hi,

MSFS uses PBR materials. You would have to check the alpha mode property, which is set to opaque and that should be transparent.

It might be a bug that MCX does not set this right on import. Does the transparency come from a texture or from the material color?

 

[=rk=]

It should be no problem to make the conversion, if you want to do it manually. You are using polygon color and you would want to focus on this part of the material pane:

The most important setting, imo, is setting Alpha mode to Blend. "Mask" also works well for images that do not need a gradual blending from opaque to clear. You can see I am using a texture, but the material settings work the same for colored polygons. The other major attributes are PBR metallic and roughness, you can use a COMP texture to represent these attributes, or set a numeric value as I have, which the SDK prefers.

A question for you Arno, I see the universal material template offers several more options under the MSFS category, than does the MSFS specific material template. Are all of those extra attributes, Fresnel factor, Glass reflection mask factor, etc. valid, or is that the reason they are not included in the MSFS template?

 

[arno]

Hi Rick,

Material attributes that are not supported by MSFS, for example those only supported by FSX, P3D or X-Plane are not shown in the MSFS filter. So any of these attributes are not exported to the glTF file.

 

[=rk=]

Thank you and I’d thought that was so, in which case I’d recommend the OP also switch to the MSFS template, when converting, to avoid confusion.

 

[Stefan01]

Thank you very much for the answers.
The texture for the window glass is a color "color80ED9564".
For the PBR value Alpha mode there are 4 choices in MCX: Opaque,Mask,Blend and Dither.
I tried the following.
1.)Update MCX to v 1.6.0.0f9ba585e 07-Jan-23
2.)In Material Editor set PBR value Alpha mode to Mask,Blend and Dither in order.
3.)and exported each afterwards.

Unfortunately without success Stefan

 

[=rk=]

Great news that you are experimenting, I apologize for being incomplete. MCX will automatically transfer the color transparency blend threshold from your 3d software, but in this case, that value was not established. To do it manually, you want to go to the albedo color field, click the arrow to the right to get the color swatches flyout, then click and drag the slider on the right downward from 255 to around 20-30. This will add a fourth transparency group to the three RGB values, more opaque is higher (where your transparency is currently set) and greater transparency is a lower number on the slider.

Next, if you go up to the preconfigured material templates, select "Set default transparent" and click apply, this sometimes changes the MCX display from opaque, to transparent for the affected polygons, but it has no effect on the MSFS render. One last this to watch for is back side color. The best format for transparent windows in FSX and P3D, is colored/textured frontside faces and null or uncolored backside faces. This formula causes the fewest visual anomalies, like when looking past through a second window at a model in the background. MSFS supports that format and it also supports back side material transparency. However, MSFS does not support untextured front faces, they simply "do not exist," which can be especially an issue for Sketchup users, because Sketchup makes little distinction between front and back. As a consequence of the front side polygon rule in MSFS, MCX adds a pure white 255,255,255 color called "material," for every untextured front side polygon, because why else would a polygon be there - Sketchup is probably why.

In many cases, if the model is built correctly, we can just discard the "material" texture, it usually represents front side faces inside the model, that should not have been present anyway and deleting the color, deletes them. Sometimes, the neglected face polys are visible. In that case you can change the pure white to something more appealing and when you convert your polygon colors to material colors, there is no render cost for the extra hidden colored polygons. Now, if the clear polygons in your model happen to be back side faces, MCX will apply material white to the opposite side, which is something to watch out for and you'll need to remove that material white to restore transparency on that side of the polygon. If you do not need to see through both sides, you can leave it, because one side of a polygons transparency, is not affected by the transparency values of the other side.

 

[Stefan01]

Thanks for the tips the models were made with Sketchup 2017.
I did the following:
1) Imported P3d lib.bgl into MCX.
2.) Opened the color 1 EED9564 which is for the window glass in the material editor.
3.) Albedo Color moved the slider from 128 to 30.
4) Set default transparent (was already selected) then pressed Apply.
5.) Exported scenery into the format P3D v4.4 (so that the changes are preserved).
6.)Exported scenery as MSFS scenery package
Unfortunately without success.
Maybe I overlooked an important step or did not execute it.
To simplify the help for which I am very grateful I have compressed the P3D files and the MSFS package and attached them. The buildings in the library are very simple. Please keep in mind that I am a beginner and the buildings are my first attempt.
Thanks again Stefan

 

[=rk=]

OK, here is one of your terminal models prepared for and tested in MSFS. Please pay close attention to the image above, where the word "Blend" is highlighted in yellow and make sure all your models conform to that designation.

You can see that a couple of the panels are white from the inside.

This is likely due to the face reversal issue that I had commented before. The most practical way to eliminate this, is to select View>Face Style>Monochrome in Sketchup. This will show the untextured, uncolored polygons and you want to reverse all the blue ones, to be white on the outside of the model.

 

[arno]

OK, here is one of your terminal models prepared for and tested in MSFS. Please pay close attention to the image above, where the word "Blend" is highlighted in yellow and make sure all your models conform to that designation.

I had a look at your glTF files as well and no alphaMode setting was saved in there, which means it is the default value of opaque. You need to ensure that it is set to blend.

I did also check the loading of the P3D model. It is a bug in MCX that the AlphaMode attribute is not set to Blend directly. I will fix that in the next release.

 

[=rk=]

Well, all I can say, is what you see, is what you get. The model in the image has been unedited since loading in MSFS and here it is displayed with Alpha mode Blend displayed in my MCX. Perhaps you are looking at the "MSFS Material type" field?

 

[arno]

Rick,

Not sure which glTF file you opened, but if I load the Terminal-new_001.glTF from the attached zip file, I don't see the blend attribute set. That is what I was referring to.

 

[=rk=]

Ok, I'll do my best to try to clear up your uncertainty. From the MS_Terminal_new.zip upload, I extracted Terminal-new_000.xml, MS_Terminal_new\MSFS\PackageSources\modellib\Terminal-new_000. I renamed it "Terminal," for simplicity. To that file, I applied the material settings, saved the textures to my own working project texture folder, exported the gltf, started the sim, built my project and placed the model, of which I offered a screenshot to confirm. I then took that same folder within my Package Sources directory, zipped it and uploaded it here. After you posted that it was not correct, I reopened the file in MCX, took that screenshot, double checked the zipped model just to make sure and informed such.

I am 100% certain that the model with transparent windows you see displayed in MSFS above, is also the model I zipped and uploaded here. There is extremely little room for error with such a procedure. I cannot speak to your ability to confirm the settings that I know have been applied to the model that you see in the image.

 

[Stefan01]

Many thanks for the tips and the help. I will implement this at the weekend.
Thanks
Stefan

 

[Stefan01]

I used MCX v 1.6.0.39915d74DEV 12-Jan 23 to create the lib and set the PBR alpha mode to blend and now the windows are transparent.
Thanks again Stefan

 

[=rk=]