Not usually a fan of Aerosoft sceneries, this one may be different though. Great attention to detail, although, something about some of the objects, specifically Autogen drags some of the shots down a bit. If they are using a custom autogen library, some texture baking could go a long way.
Not really, baking isn't adding another thing for the sim itself to render, shadow bakes are rendered right onto the texture itself, which is going to be there no matter what. No loss of performance whatsoever, just an extra step a developer can take to add a little more realism to their product.
I know what texture baking is :) To do this succesfully is more than one step. Texture Baking=More texture space=More texture vertices=More materials=More drawcalls. The result? Worse performance. So you need to be very wise on where to spend resources for this cool stuff ;) the airport for sure, but scenery...don't know, depends :)
Sorry I'm going to step in here, texture baking onto the diffuse causes 0 performance loss. It's no different then playing with the colours and contrast of the texture map itself. It adds 0 vertices, textual or not, and NO extra drawcalls. You may be thinking of shadow maps, which we tend to use in Source engine games in certain scenes to pre-render ambient occlusion which can be dynamically displayed based on the current lighting condition. This however is not an option in by default in FSX, and certainly not a material setting.
Keep in mind texturing baking is BAKING shadows onto the diffuse as an OVERLAY. This does absolutely nothing, if anything can actually reduce filesize in certain compression modes (less information on the map).
I say this as a game developer of many years, who's worked on and built a variety of games.
I hear you :) Thanks for the reply. It's going way off topic now but interesting :) To texture bake, let's say, a block of 20 buildings (4 faces each+1face on top). You would need to assign at least 2-3faces of each building on a different texture area to get something decent. Otherwise you will start getting repeated shadows. In the other scenario, of no texture baking, you could easily assign all faces on a single texture space area. So how is texture baking technique not increasing texture vertices (4 texture vertices vs. 12-16 texture vertices?) Or how does it not lead to an increased demand for texture space? Of course the baking is no different than changing the colour on a texture, but to do this you simply need MORE TEXTURE. Assume 20 buildings using texture baking technique. I 'guess'-timate at least 5-6 times the amount of texture maps (materials/drawcalls, whatever you want to call them) to cover all that. On the other hand you can have 20 buildings, mapped on 20 faces. Each face mapped on one small space on the texture. How is this the same thing??
Not so...With ambient occlusion setup correctly this wouldn't be a problem. If you indeed intended on having building-to-building shadows you are correct, you'd need waaay too many maps. However, ambient occlusion is what it says on the tin- ambient lighting and shading that'd occur pretty much all the time. It's best used on building-to--ground. As someone that has done this on sceneries for a few companies before, I can say the improvement is incredible. It makes the buildings look 'rooted' to the ground, rather than floating on a dark sea of mesh.
Totally agree with you on this..If we are talking about occlusion to the ground, definitely that's the way to go! The terrain in FS is a bit hard to deal with however..Very stimulating discussion though. Perhaps we could continue outside the blog. I guess that visitors will be far less interested :-P
9 comments:
Not usually a fan of Aerosoft sceneries, this one may be different though. Great attention to detail, although, something about some of the objects, specifically Autogen drags some of the shots down a bit. If they are using a custom autogen library, some texture baking could go a long way.
Baking the textures of such a massive scenery library is impossible. Well it is possible, but you have to fly with 2FPS... :)
Not really, baking isn't adding another thing for the sim itself to render, shadow bakes are rendered right onto the texture itself, which is going to be there no matter what. No loss of performance whatsoever, just an extra step a developer can take to add a little more realism to their product.
I know what texture baking is :) To do this succesfully is more than one step. Texture Baking=More texture space=More texture vertices=More materials=More drawcalls. The result? Worse performance. So you need to be very wise on where to spend resources for this cool stuff ;) the airport for sure, but scenery...don't know, depends :)
Sorry I'm going to step in here, texture baking onto the diffuse causes 0 performance loss. It's no different then playing with the colours and contrast of the texture map itself. It adds 0 vertices, textual or not, and NO extra drawcalls. You may be thinking of shadow maps, which we tend to use in Source engine games in certain scenes to pre-render ambient occlusion which can be dynamically displayed based on the current lighting condition. This however is not an option in by default in FSX, and certainly not a material setting.
Keep in mind texturing baking is BAKING shadows onto the diffuse as an OVERLAY. This does absolutely nothing, if anything can actually reduce filesize in certain compression modes (less information on the map).
I say this as a game developer of many years, who's worked on and built a variety of games.
I hear you :) Thanks for the reply. It's going way off topic now but interesting :)
To texture bake, let's say, a block of 20 buildings (4 faces each+1face on top). You would need to assign at least 2-3faces of each building on a different texture area to get something decent. Otherwise you will start getting repeated shadows. In the other scenario, of no texture baking, you could easily assign all faces on a single texture space area. So how is texture baking technique not increasing texture vertices (4 texture vertices vs. 12-16 texture vertices?) Or how does it not lead to an increased demand for texture space? Of course the baking is no different than changing the colour on a texture, but to do this you simply need MORE TEXTURE. Assume 20 buildings using texture baking technique. I 'guess'-timate at least 5-6 times the amount of texture maps (materials/drawcalls, whatever you want to call them) to cover all that. On the other hand you can have 20 buildings, mapped on 20 faces. Each face mapped on one small space on the texture. How is this the same thing??
Not so...With ambient occlusion setup correctly this wouldn't be a problem. If you indeed intended on having building-to-building shadows you are correct, you'd need waaay too many maps. However, ambient occlusion is what it says on the tin- ambient lighting and shading that'd occur pretty much all the time. It's best used on building-to--ground. As someone that has done this on sceneries for a few companies before, I can say the improvement is incredible. It makes the buildings look 'rooted' to the ground, rather than floating on a dark sea of mesh.
Totally agree with you on this..If we are talking about occlusion to the ground, definitely that's the way to go! The terrain in FS is a bit hard to deal with however..Very stimulating discussion though. Perhaps we could continue outside the blog. I guess that visitors will be far less interested :-P
I'd be happy to discuss this stuff anytime. You can contact me via admin*at*enigmasim.com
Post a Comment
Comments are now deactivated. Please visit our new website: AirDailyX.net
Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.