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FSX:SE True emissive material recipe (for cockpit interior)

Misho

Misho

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I am working on an interior model of a space capsule for my Spaceflight Module project. Being a capsule, it has small windows and it is fully enclosed (unlike the aircraft which have rather large windows). So, I textured my interior, set up lights, and "baked" a nice set of textures with shadows baked into them.

Now, what I need is a material which is behaving like a LM (emissive) texture both day and night. Basically, a material that is not shaded or highlighted by night or sunlight in any way - it stays completely and fully emissive (and textured) at the exact tone and hue of its texture... I've come close, but I am still getting sunlight highlights and hints of shadow depending on where the light source is.

Does anyone have a "recipe" for this please?

Here is the material I have so far:
upload_2017-6-21_23-38-28.png
 
Here is the "effect" I am getting and trying to get rid off:

This is the docking hatch tunnel inside the space capsule. I would hope for it to have a uniform look, as in area around A, however, I am getting a sunlight "glint", as in area B. This is INSIDE the enclosed capsule with very small windows, so obviously, I don't want any sunlight or darkness getting in there, only the pure texture as rendered :D

Any insight would be appreciated.
upload_2017-6-22_14-18-5.png
 
bob5568 said:
I wasn't aware that the sims could make use of material self illumination settings.
Click to expand...

Yup. There are a lot of settings in the FSX material, and a lot of things are possible. It just takes a while to try all the permutations and observe subtle effects on them. :(
 
Misho,

You may be able to control time of day effects with a gauge; unsure of that. Alternatively, I would check the material uses of the Fresnel Ramp with Diffuse and maybe specular; they give you lots of control. See the SDK teapot on materials.
 
Milton_Shupe said:
Misho,

You may be able to control time of day effects with a gauge; unsure of that. Alternatively, I would check the material uses of the Fresnel Ramp with Diffuse and maybe specular; they give you lots of control. See the SDK teapot on materials.
Click to expand...

Thanks Milton! I don't think I want to go the gauge way (not sure how that would work and affect one particular material). I am close - I just need to fine tune it. You might be onto something with Fresnel Ramp approach, I'll look into it. Right now there are a few other things I can try - for example, my textures are plain 24-bit bmps, no alpha channel. Imagetool converts that to DXT5 with pure white alpha, so I might be getting these bright spots because of that at some level in the settings. I'll try using a proper PSD with a black alpha, see if that changes anything.
 
in FSX you can't do much with blooming/sunlight effect on model (internal model). in P3D that have "shadows" can eliminated sunlight inside model.
if I not wrong "steve direct fixer" have "shadow" feature in it to eliminated sunlight effect
 
kalong said:
in FSX you can't do much with blooming/sunlight effect on model (internal model). in P3D that have "shadows" can eliminated sunlight inside model.
if I not wrong "steve direct fixer" have "shadow" feature in it to eliminated sunlight effect
Click to expand...

FSX materials keep surprising me over and over. I'll keep poking at it, there are a few holes I haven't plugged yet ;)
 
Misho said:
Thanks Milton! I don't think I want to go the gauge way (not sure how that would work and affect one particular material). I am close - I just need to fine tune it. You might be onto something with Fresnel Ramp approach, I'll look into it. Right now there are a few other things I can try - for example, my textures are plain 24-bit bmps, no alpha channel. Imagetool converts that to DXT5 with pure white alpha, so I might be getting these bright spots because of that at some level in the settings. I'll try using a proper PSD with a black alpha, see if that changes anything.
Click to expand...

I do not think the alpha channel has any effect on sunlight itself, only specular level and color, glossiness, or transparency depending on material settings.

The fresnel ramp can be used to shade objects differently according to the "camera location". Or, shade all as I understand it.
 
I think Milton might be correct. Try using a flat single color fresnel ramp rather than a gradient. This would eliminate falloff. Try pure black then lighten as needed.
 
Thanks guys. I tried playing with fresnel, just like you suggested, full black (after carefully reading and understanding SDK), but it had no effect whatsoever on sunlight glint. I am getting it exactly the way I want at nighttime, but the daytime keeps being highlighted by sunlight, in an almost fully enclosed space. The current FSX graphics system doesn't care if the volume is enclosed (unless there are VC shadows working, but that's another can of worms altogether), so it would be really nice if there was a way of "faking" this.

Trying another thing, a bit unconventional, but let's see where it goes...
 
Folks,

I GOT IT!!!!! :D:cool:

A truly fully-emissive textured material that stays unaffected by day or night shading, or by VC cockpit lighting. Great for all parts where "the sun don't ever shine" :), like cockpit foot wells, gear/wheel wells, cargo holds, and other dark places which inexplicably (and unrealistically) get sunlight in FSX. Like I was mentioning, FSX material has a lot of options accessible through the 3DS MAX editor, and it always surprises me what is possible.

Anyway, here's the "recipe" below: Simple, and very close to what I had in the beginning, with one major crucial change: A diffuse texture is replaced by (what I call) "ZeroSpecular", which is basically a small map (mine is 256x256, but I think it can be 1x1 pixel for all intents and purposes) which has its RGB channel ("normal" color) RGB(1,1,1), and its Alpha channel RGB(1,1,1) as well. The reason for RGB(1,1,1) is ImageTool's nasty tendency to replace RGB(0,0,0) by pure white - I guess it reads zero as "nothing" and defaults to white. This little gotcha cost me a lot of sleepless hours in the past, so I just "safe" it to RGB(1,1,1). This material has its drawbacks: for example, it will be unaffected by VC lights. Sometimes this is advantageous if you are texturing parts that never get any light, but in my case, I'd like to have a multiple cockpit lighting system, so I'll have to play with showing/hiding parts accordingly. Another small change in material is "Specular Map Power Scale" bumped to max 256, because this value makes specular highlight smaller the higher it is. This probably doesn't affect the material, but it is here for clarity.

Like I was mentioning, this needed a bit of "out of the box" thinking and was a bit counter-intuitive (doing away with diffuse but keeping lightmap), but in the end, it paid off. Hope someone can make use of it, like I know I will! :D

upload_2017-6-24_14-26-26.png
 
@Misho that is excellent detective work! Thanks for working on this. I expect it will be very useful and I'm marking this thread for later reference.
 
Misho, that actually makes perfect sense now that you've discovered and explained it. Additive takes the diffuse and self-illumination textures and "adds them together" which effectively doubles their ambient level in the sim. By using a "blank" diffuse texture, the end result is an otherwise "normal" diffuse effect, albeit without the additive nature and outside lighting effects.
 
Hi Bill!

That was exactly my reasoning. I looked at the difference between how it behaves at night (the way I wanted) and how it behaves during the day (adding the sunlight) and thought to myself - if it is Additive, why don't I simply subtract what I don't need - i.e. day effect. Then I thought, well maybe that will render the texture dark during the day. Then I remembered the "AdditiveNightOnly" option, and realised that the dark surface would exhibit only with "AdditiveNightOnly", and thought "Additive" plus dark diffuse texture should do the trick - and it did!
 
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