I have found at several addon airports the flood lights are not being placed realistically or defined correctly. For example many of them are making use of point lights instead of spot lights, using large X scale distance of hunderds, and placing lights at fictional locations at unrealistic angles and excessive brightness, leading to washed look and more than necessary performance hit.
So decided to put down some points I thought in my experimentaton have given me properly working realistic airport flood lights:
1. Attach the flood light effect realistically positioned on the light pole model then orienting the effect with Y-axis in the intended light pointing direction, as this is the direction towards which spotlight will shine when X Scale value is put to set its illuminating distance.
2. Try to keep X scale around 80 which should be sufficient in most cases, as anything larger appears to hit gpu significantly.
3. Use half of the intended cone angle value as P3D appears to make it 2x, so for a 120 deg required light cone angle put value 60.
4. For preventing overbrightning of non PBR materials illumination, note at your airport max number of placed lights coinciding at one area since it seems they add up in brightness which then applies to all lights at the airport, then in Color End= the last entry of brightness make it lower so that the sum is around 120 or less as otherwise they will have glaring brightness.
5. Color of 250, 240, 180 works really well as LED flood light color in the sim.
6. Use Intensity Night= 300-500 which should be sufficient in most cases, as anything larger and still very dark means problem with 4 which is making p3d reduce PBR brightness as well.
7. Use falloff exponent around 1.2, value of 2 is only realistic for point light or omni direction light as it has no reflector. This will also allow use of smaller X scale to save performance.
Hope it helps.
Regards
So decided to put down some points I thought in my experimentaton have given me properly working realistic airport flood lights:
1. Attach the flood light effect realistically positioned on the light pole model then orienting the effect with Y-axis in the intended light pointing direction, as this is the direction towards which spotlight will shine when X Scale value is put to set its illuminating distance.
2. Try to keep X scale around 80 which should be sufficient in most cases, as anything larger appears to hit gpu significantly.
3. Use half of the intended cone angle value as P3D appears to make it 2x, so for a 120 deg required light cone angle put value 60.
4. For preventing overbrightning of non PBR materials illumination, note at your airport max number of placed lights coinciding at one area since it seems they add up in brightness which then applies to all lights at the airport, then in Color End= the last entry of brightness make it lower so that the sum is around 120 or less as otherwise they will have glaring brightness.
5. Color of 250, 240, 180 works really well as LED flood light color in the sim.
6. Use Intensity Night= 300-500 which should be sufficient in most cases, as anything larger and still very dark means problem with 4 which is making p3d reduce PBR brightness as well.
7. Use falloff exponent around 1.2, value of 2 is only realistic for point light or omni direction light as it has no reflector. This will also allow use of smaller X scale to save performance.
Hope it helps.
Regards