• Which the release of FS2020 we see an explosition of activity on the forun and of course we are very happy to see this. But having all questions about FS2020 in one forum becomes a bit messy. So therefore we would like to ask you all to use the following guidelines when posting your questions:

    • Tag FS2020 specific questions with the MSFS2020 tag.
    • Questions about making 3D assets can be posted in the 3D asset design forum. Either post them in the subforum of the modelling tool you use or in the general forum if they are general.
    • Questions about aircraft design can be posted in the Aircraft design forum
    • Questions about airport design can be posted in the FS2020 airport design forum. Once airport development tools have been updated for FS2020 you can post tool speciifc questions in the subforums of those tools as well of course.
    • Questions about terrain design can be posted in the FS2020 terrain design forum.
    • Questions about SimConnect can be posted in the SimConnect forum.

    Any other question that is not specific to an aspect of development or tool can be posted in the General chat forum.

    By following these guidelines we make sure that the forums remain easy to read for everybody and also that the right people can find your post to answer it.

Custom Edge Lights with Emissives

yorgosGK

yorgosGK

Messages
86
Country
canada
Project I am working on requires precise placement of edge lights (you can see their placement even on real life satellite imagery). I modeled and textured an edge light with emissives (with a day/night cycle) and added a soft point light to the model to mimic the real life representation. All looks awesome however (as spoken about in some other posts on this forum) when you have a small model with emissive it uses the size of it to determine when to kill the light effect (emissives and light elements Blender adds) when a certain distance away from them. If I was to size up the edge light model and make it bigger it would tolerate more distance before being muted.

See here close up:
Screenshot_12.jpg


See here further out:
Screenshot_11.jpg


I have tried a few things, make flipped mesh in the model (that's huge) and tuck it away below the ground to fake a bigger object, play with the .gltf emissive perimeters (that are essentially non existent) and inserting separate light object to place on top of my edge light and show emissive only when super close.

I cant find a good work around or fix for this - the default ones are horrifying and make me sad to look at and to place them with the precision that I need via LightRow comes a long with bugs like no day/night cycle etc.

Super annoyed that this looks perfect but I lose it when out a little far and when taxing you see the lights pop up in the distance.

Has anyone successfully solved this and come up with a holy grail solution to be able to omit light even from far? Thank you in advance.
 

Attachments

  • Screenshot_10.jpg
    Screenshot_10.jpg
    702.1 KB · Views: 178
I figured it out! - If you are in the market for creating your own edge lights to have full and precise control, make emissives - create your nice soft light in blender using the light parameters (to match real world characteristics) then make a dummy "dead light" on top of your mesh with a power of 0. The game engine will still render the light below as if it where close up and not kill lighting from far as it still thinks a light is higher.

Blender project:
Screenshot_15.jpg



Inside MSFS:
Screenshot_19.jpg


How it renders from very far away now:
Screenshot_16.jpg


Close up with + emissive map (WIP no creative comments here plz lol):
Screenshot_18.jpg


Good work around for now. I will report if I run into any issues. Cheers.
 
Hi. What does your solution look like from a "approach perspective"? From a good runway length away?
Your screenshot is from nearly straight above, so all lights are roughly the same brightness. I tried and failed to do a similar thing for runway lights. The problem is, that there seems to be one element missing that is present in the stock lights. A light source that doesn't diminish in the distance the same way as normal geometry (as an emissive light bulb does).

www.fsdeveloper.com

Lights with corona (not THAT corona...)

Hi all I'm trying to bring runway lights and taxiway lights to small airfields. There are a few shortcomings out of the box: The lights objects in the scenery category are just that: 3d objects. They are not functional. In order to precisely place single taxiway lights I could just use short...
www.fsdeveloper.com www.fsdeveloper.com
www.fsdeveloper.com

MSFS20 - 3-D Lights in MSFS

Hi. I would like to ask if there is a possibility to add the internal runway lights of the MFS to his own 3-D model. What are meant are the lights that are green on one side and red on the other, etc. The internal MFS lights should actually have a GUID ?! Or asked a little differently. Can you...
www.fsdeveloper.com www.fsdeveloper.com
 
They where a little poppy, I went and I raised the dummy light even more and it solved. I was on a 6nm final and I could see them a long with the green taxi lights. Im still a happy camper for now. I will test more, I just did this a few moments ago so I am sure I will maybe find more things! Would be awesome if you tried as well :) cheers.
 
This is like FS2004 where we had to put bandaides on on every project to get it to work. Fixes, workarounds, hacks... It would be OK but Asobo changes the sim with every update, so it is always a moving target. We only had one update with FS2004 to deal with.
 
Last edited:
the default edge lighting for taxiways is driving me crazy. I can't get it to behave in any fashion that makes sense like it did in FSX. What is the status of these objects @yorgosGK - Are they for a payware project? Can I license them for my freeware? I'm just improving stock airports as I visit them and uploading them to flightsim.to
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top