v2 New Developer ?'s

[King_Richard]

Some "new developer" questions.

First, I'm working on auto gen for the city of Las Vegas at the moment. But, the agn buildings are extremely bright, roofs and walls all seem to be evenly lit. Event the downtown section is overly bright. I'm trying to figure out how I can darken these buildings. I've already tried to adjust several textures from the texture, scenery/global/texture and namw/texture folders of which was mostly unsuccessful. Only a few buildings were affected and the results weren't good.


Using scenProc I used the guid{00000000-0000-0000-0000-000000000000} since it gives me a nice random amount of buildings. Is there any other guid that I can use that will give me a mix of buildings at random as well? Preferably something that closer resembles buildings built in the desert. Arizona, New Mexico, Nevada region.

Do I need to create a custom texture sheet? And if so, is there a guide to that. I've read through the learning center but am unsure of how I'd implement a custom texture sheet. Am I better off creating some custom buildings to use instead and defining my own materials to use, or is there something else that can be done.

Second, I've created a street light "3d" of sort but it only has one color thus far. I've yet to find any info on how to set it up to use a texture sheet so that I can add multiple colors to one image and just clone the model to get different guids to use. Street light is attached along with the .x and .mdl, if anyone wants to create an example on how to set this up I'd really appreciate it.

Also, I am unable to create multiple lod's of the streetlight without it disappearing. I've read some on this and have not seen any solutions for such small objects. The idea was to be able to control the intensity/size at close distance while still being visible at long distances but nothing I've tried has worked. Whenever there's more than one lod, the object disappears at a small distance.

Lastly, my pr scenery is too bright at night. I've read somewhere about a numerical value that can be set to control the brightness of the scenery but did not find where that value is to be set. I'd assume it's something to set while creating the bgl.

Have already learned a lot from this forum and I'll most definitely have more questions down the road! Thanks to those who read and respond.

 

[arno]

Hi,

For the autogen there are many roof guids, but they mainly define how the roof looks. For the texture of the walls it's either the default one (which different per region) or you can assign a custom one to your autogen tile.

For the custom one is has to have the same layout as given in the autogen sdk for building textures.

Does your photorealistic scenery have a specific night version or is it just the automatically dimmed day version that you find too bright?

 

[King_Richard]

For the autogen I tried tracking down the default one but was unable to find one that was used for the houses in this region which I assumed was in the namw folder. Suppose I'll have to experiment with a custom one. Appending _lm to the texture should automatically make it used for the night texture...... is there a list put together anywhere of where these textures are for each region?

Day/Night scenery:

I've ran it both, one with just a day version and the other with both where the night image was pure black except for a few roads and other wanted effects. Each has produced the same results.

Thinking about it, the flight is during a full moon, which could be overriding my settings but I have adjusted the TOD (time of day) to where the moon isn't or barely visible. I'll look into how to adjust the moon phase to see if that's the problem as well.

 

[toprob]

The thing which makes the most different in P3D2 at night is the HDR setting -- try turning it off at night, otherwise it'll over-brighten things.

 

[arno]

Hi,

All autogen textures are in the main texture folder, not in NAMW or so.

For the autogen building textures the night textures have LM added (without the underscore).

 

[King_Richard]

toprob,
I tried it without HDR but without bloom, the street lights aren't as bright as they should be. It did however dim the downtown district to a more reasonable brightness. I'll just have to play with those lightmaps.
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Arno,
Majority of the textures include the underscore before the LM, which is why assumed that was the standard, however, I just set the textures to BLD_North_America_South_1 which has a _LM night texture. That flagged the no content output resulting in:

[error.0]
error=Texture BLD_North_America_South_1LM.BMP failed to load (FE_REQUEST_STATUS==13)

So I will be able create a new sheet and apply the LM to get the effects that I want! Thanks.
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The numerical brightness value that I mentioned earlier for the scenery is noted in the learning center. There's two settings but it's to be set in the "Prepar3D.cfg":

[Graphics]
Day_Threshold
"A value between 0 (total darkness) to 65535 (full day sun at noon in summer) that represents the amount of ambient light to apply to textures at the end of the day/night threshold. The default value is 32768 (50 percent of full brightness). The smaller the difference between Day_Threshold and Night_Threshold, the quicker twilight and sunrise will be."

Night_Threshold
"The default value is 4096 (6.25 percent of full brightness)."

I'm not entirely sure I understand how this works. Do I adjust Night_Threshold to control the ambient light at night? I set it to 512 but didn't notice a difference.

 

[King_Richard]

Finally figured it all out for the most part.



Only problem I'm having now is finding suitable imagery to use for the houses in that region and there's a few buildings that are overlapping. But the buildings are no longer glowing, and I'm content for now.

The day/night thresholds only appears to effect the buildings textures or object texture blending and not the scenery textures. Still searching for a solution to that.