Author Topic: Shimmering Textures  (Read 2390 times)

croftspardon

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Shimmering Textures
« on: July 06, 2019, 07:56:47 am »
I just bought a high spec computer and the best improvement was being able to use multi-sampling to eliminate shimmering for the first time for me in P3D.
Within a week I installed the first PBR airport (not FSDT) and the shimmering was back!

This is a known problem with PBR and P3Dv4. It was supposed to be fixed in V4.5, but wasn't.
I believe that the benefits of PBR are not worth the penalty of the loss of stability. In some sceneries (not FSDT), flashing lines etc are like turning the clock back 10 years on quality, for a PBR effect I can hardly see from the flightdeck.

That being said, I can live with it in most cases, but there are certain areas where the shimmering is terrible. In GSX that's the anti-slip surface on top of the pushback truck and on some jetways. Vertical sections on the curved/rotating bit of the gate. These are probably areas where the textures are too big for the areas they display in. Never-the-less, nobody would notice if they weren't PBR- but we sure notice that they are... because of the violent shimmering.

As it could be a long time before LM find a solution, please be sensitive to this issue and avoid PBR where these problems are obvious and benefits of PBR are tiny.

Thanks for your continual updates and everything you do for us.

Keith

virtuali

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Re: Shimmering Textures
« Reply #1 on: July 06, 2019, 11:24:36 am »
Quote
Within a week I installed the first PBR airport (not FSDT) and the shimmering was back!

This tells all. We are all waiting for LM to improve on this.

We might reduce it somewhat, by lowering resolution in the normal maps, but I think this is the wrong approach, because our objects, when seen in other PBR engines, shows entirely fine, so we won't make any change to adapt to what seems a P3D4 issue which might eventually be fixed, only to change them again when and if the problem will go away.

There was a similar issue when 4.4 was just released: colors in PBR were a bit muted and shadows were too light. This was fixed in 4.5, which has more vibrant rendering and deep colors compared to 4.4. It would have been WRONG (not to mention very time consuming, for nothing) to redo all our objects, because in the time it might have taken for us to "fix" our textures that were already correct in the first place, LM released 4.5, so we would had to go back.

Bill721

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Re: Shimmering Textures
« Reply #2 on: July 06, 2019, 07:53:49 pm »
Thank you for the post.  I'm having the same issue.  Any GSX help would be appreciated.  I hope it gets fixed prior to P3D version 5.

Bill