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MSFS How to create a custom aircraft light in FS2020?

SRBIJAAAA

SRBIJAAAA

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46
So far I've learnt that in order to create a custom aircraft light, we need to create an Effect folder in our project, than copy a couple of Asobo preset FX lights and rename them. How do we tell the project where these new presets are? I've tried trough the layout.xml which is in the packages folder but it gives me an error.. I assume we need to enter that path somewhere else?

Changed the original message to this, just to simplify the question.
 
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Two quick things. In some cases for lights nomenclature matters, I would match exact Asobo terms and meshes until I got it worked out. As an example, for my glare shield, I was only ever able to use default Asobo lights material, I could have maybe moved on from that but I never tried once I got it working. The second thing I would suggest is to select "expert mode" in the edit drop down and stop saving from the AircraftEditor. Instead make your changes in the AircraftEditor, copy those values to the relevant .cfg files, save those and then refresh. Switching to expert mode saved me the headache of prevented and undesired edits to my .cfg files, so you might want ot try it. If you look at the various tabs of your AircraftEditor, the little white dot will show the unsaved edited ones and the editor was constantly changing mine to default values until I stopped it.
 
OK, it seems like these lights we create in the aircraft editor are default lights and are looking for ASOBO default meshes wherever they are. And any change to those light parameters will not be saved.. I assume I have to somehow duplicate an asobo light and modify it in order to be able to save it. Similar to control preset assignments for our yokes, joysticks etc.. I've now managed at least to move the lights in space.. but still no luck with color customization. Working on it, any tips are appreciated. As soon as I manage to make it work will share the solution here.
 
I just used the light materials from the SDK sample SimpleAircraft project. My panel light is green, so I mapped the green navigation light color to my own custom mesh.


I made a quick demonstration video and included the lighting Template to get a Tooltip light switch, an emissive mesh to illuminate the bulb and a light wash that actually uses two effects because the model is set up like an office and the largest Asobo cabin cabin light did not reach the floor, so I added a downward pointing taxi light as well. Also the switch itself glows in the dark slightly but that is just the basic material emissive setting. The text of the Template is in the YouTube description.

 
@=rk= in your script above what is actually your: LIGHT_flourescent2 Is that a mesh that appears or second material that has emissive?
 
No see that is the beauty and also limitation of the Template system, although I imagine one could find a SubTemplate to attenuate the effect. Once properly set up, the emissive factor of the light bulb is algorithmically set, not by interpreting an emissive texture. The algorithm takes the albedo texture, or possibly just at the polygon level and brightens it. I have a screen capture that shows it in practice.

asobo gt emissive code.png


You can see that I used a mesh representing two bulbs, but that I had only implemented one of them. Further, you can see I made the end caps black and although I only made an emissive texture for the bulb element, the algorithm "arbitrarily" illuminated the black end caps. The simple solution was to just remove the end caps and attach them to the housing instead.
 
So what are LIGHT_flourescent1 and LIGHT_flourescent2 in your case?

And what is the name of light you are using? (you said you used taxi light) just want to make sure what'd what in the script.

are those the names of meshes or names of blender materials?

As you explained, does that mean we don't have to make a material emissive (strong emmission)?
 
By the way, I've found out how to duplicate and modify asobo light preset fx

Copy them from their original folder into your folder called Effects for example. Save that folder with light preset coppies into your package folder.
Rename and modify those light presets (color, strength etc)
Than use layout generator to update your layout json in the same package folder.

Now start the sim and in the aircraft editor you will have these new custom light presets available.
 
SRBIJAAAA said:
So what are LIGHT_flourescent1 and LIGHT_flourescent2 in your case?

And what is the name of light you are using? (you said you used taxi light) just want to make sure what'd what in the script.
Click to expand...

LIGHT_flourescent1 and LIGHT_flourescent2 are the tube meshes. They serve as nodes to attach the light effects and also to display the emissive element, there is no emissive texture although you could probably modify the Template to use one instead. The light effects are LIGHT_ASOBO_CockpitMinimalAmbiantLarge and LIGHT_Longitude_Taxi_Downwash, although you can assign any default or custom effect to the node.
 
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