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How to get MSFS glass material transparent in MSFS

jgarnold

jgarnold

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australia
I have a small building with a number of windows and each has the same material attached which is set with MSFS material params set to glass and 'metallic' set to 0.84 and roughness set to 0.
In Blender the windows have some reflectivity and also can been seen through however when in MSFS the glass windows are opaque.
[added later]
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I have found that I need to set the alpha channel (A in the color) to almost 0 before the windows have some transparency. There does not seem to be much 'latitude' in the setting. Anything above about 0.25 results in opaque glass in MSFS. And the 'look' in Blender is far more transparent than in MSFS. Very annoying. WYSINWYG


Below are screen shots from Blender and MSFS with the alpha channel set to 0.3

glass_problem_blender.jpg



glass_problem.jpg
 
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The SDK describes very specific parameters for glass material. If you're having trouble, you probably need to follow the required settings.

Translucent Elements

docs.flightsimulator.com docs.flightsimulator.com

Bear in mind the section referring to glass is the Cockpit Modeling section. It has some interesting features, with the "dirt" setting, but the way it is set up it appears less versatile than simple blend masking. Any MSFS texture or color can be faded in 100 steps between 0.00 and 1.00 or infinitely using a masking layer, but the fact that metallic and roughness must be set to "0.00" to use the glass material reduces its versatility imo.

I have always only used blended texture or color to simulate glass and it seems to work pretty well. If I need lettering, I use a .png with a transparent or mildly tinted background. If there is a lot of dirt on the glass and because of that, blend mask is making the solid parts look transparent, we can define a transparency threshold using dither mask beyond which everything is suddenly opaque.
 
=rk= said:
I have always only used blended texture or color to simulate glass and it seems to work pretty well. If I need lettering, I use a .png with a transparent or mildly tinted background. If there is a lot of dirt on the glass and because of that, blend mask is making the solid parts look transparent, we can define a transparency threshold using dither mask beyond which everything is suddenly opaque.
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Wise advice. For scenery objects, I would avoid the MSFS glass material. Just use alpha transparency. You can use the base color to tint the material. Asobo uses a standard material for their base buildings.
 
Here's a window example that uses a Standard scenery window material and textures from Asobo_Buildings: window.zip
 
Aha. Thanks Rick and Dick especially the link to translucent elements which I found very interesting.

I don't use 'glass' windows very often and I will have to try and remember to not use the MSFS 'glass' material (use standard) and I will update my ever growing 'tips' document.
 
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FYI using MSFS glass I had to set the alpha channel to 0 to get a transparent look - not even setting it to 0.05 gave enough transparency. Yes I should have not used MSFS glass as mentioned above.
 
jgarnold said:
FYI using MSFS glass I had to set the alpha channel to 0 to get a transparent look - not even setting it to 0.05 gave enough transparency. Yes I should have not used MSFS glass as mentioned above.
Click to expand...
From what I know, you adjust the transparency to your desired look via the actual texture file. PNG with transparency / alpha.
 
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