MSFS Multi-room Parallax material. Finally!

[RomanDesign]

I think I finally mastered multi-room parallax texture properly. Here's the test video with a simple cube building. Emission works too. What's funny is that rooms are randomized somehow by the sim. They are showing in a different order than I have them in my background texture. Same for emission rooms. But that's OK, I think it meant to remove a pattern look from large buildings, especially at night. See night look in the second half of the video.
This building has no 3D interior - it's just a testing cube, basically. One side has a universal material I'm going to use on different buildings depending on each model, by using UV maps for whatever windows I need, and 3 sides have a more specific material for 2 large hotel buildings my upcoming scenery will include. Full PBR structure: it has maps for albedo (window front with shutters etc.), ambient occlusion, roughness, metallic, behind-windows albedo, and emission for the random night lighting look. Rooms are actually rendered in Blender in 3D and their renderings are edited for parallax 2D texture.

The way I "reverse-engineered" it is based on the MSFS SDK sample parallax material (found in sample materials, duh!). I took the room perspective look from the background 4x4 room texture there as a guide and made my rooms. Then the rest of the PBR textures are pretty straightforward (don't use any metalness on transparent glass!). It took a lot of time to figure out the right transparencies, glass reflections and nail down the look. But there is nothing special about the textures - they are nurmal MSFS PBR textures, basically, except for the background "behind glass albedo" which is different size, exactly as in the sample. I did similar material before for a single room for my CNC3 and SYKZ sceneries, and now I have a the multi-room material for my upcoming CYOW scenery. The Blender2MSFS settings are like this for this particular material: specular 1, alpha 1, the rest surface parameters are 0. Albedo color white, emissive color - slightly yellowish, alpha multiplier 1. Parallax parameters - this is for 4x4 room textures the exact sizes of sample material! These were difficult to figure out as they are not documented well - scale 0.60, room size X 0.50 Y 0.25, number XY 4. All texture maps are set with texture files. Everything else default.

 

[stinger2k2]

I am way behind you. Still struggling with windows using the "window pane in front of albedo texture method" . How do you stop the z fighting?

I seem to end up with the windows separated by some distance before the z fighting stops.

Great work on the parallax. I may catch up with you in a years time!

Regards
Stinger

Sent from my SM-G935F using Tapatalk

 

[RomanDesign]

How do you stop the z fighting?

There is no z fighting with Parallax material. It is literally a single plane.

 

[stinger2k2]

There is no z fighting with Parallax material. It is literally a single plane.

Sorry, I should have clarified. I am not referring to parallax. I have a building with an albedo texture with planes for window reflection placed in front of where the glass would be.

Sent from my SM-T813 using Tapatalk

 

[RomanDesign]

I have a building with an albedo texture with planes for window reflection placed in front of where the glass would be.

There are all kinds of shimmering, "z-fighting" etc. when two planes are very close together. If I need real depth, I use real interior modelling, like in an airport terminal, and a custom MSFS Glass material. There are some glass "draw order" problems, as you can see, but they are not major and maybe I can deal with them by modifying the draw order in a smart way. And when there is no real 3D interiors needed I use Parallax as shown above.

When no transparency is needed at all, like on doors I can just use a MSFS Standard texture with full reflection on glass areas (black roughness), with no transparency but max reflection. I did this door material from scratch: just took some photos, assembled and edited into a square texture, created albedo, metallness, roughness and displacement textures manually in Photoshop, and generated Normal texture from displacement and ORM in Quixel Mixer. Looks great in the sim.

 

[stinger2k2]

There are all kinds of shimmering, "z-fighting" etc. when two planes are very close together. If I need real depth, I use real interior modelling, like in an airport terminal, and a custom MSFS Glass material. There are some glass "draw order" problems, as you can see, but they are not major and maybe I can deal with them by modifying the draw order in a smart way. And when there is no real 3D interiors needed I use Parallax as shown above. On a rare occasion when no transparency is needed at all, I can just use a MSFS Standard texture for glass, with no transparency but max reflection.
View attachment 68984

Ok, great. That all makes sense. The building I was attempting is a block of apartments that wouldn't be seen too close so I probably should just go with msfs glass as you say.

Thanks for the advice.

Sent from my SM-T813 using Tapatalk

 

[stinger2k2]

Your test building looks fantastic by the way

Sent from my SM-T813 using Tapatalk

 

[Av8rThor]

I relied in your other thread. I abandoned the pane in front of window method, too time consuming! I used Quixel to make the window areas reflective. Great for general, distant buildings. However I need to learn this parallax thing, great effect! Well done

 

[RomanDesign]

In a larger airport I'm working on now - CYOW Ottawa, I rely on interior 3D modeling for main terminal buildings, and parallax for all secondary buildings. I just assign all windows this material, and them scale/move UV map to align with whatever part of my texture I need. That way I have different windows etc. On the rood, where office behind glass would look silly, I aligned it with a opaque are of the material (between floors), so it still shows window panes and glass, but is not transparent, just reflective. But because all other material properties are the same, it looks and feels similar.
Here's some work in progress with those windows:

 

[arno]

Roman, sorry to bump this old thread, but do you still have that sample cube model you used in the video laying around? I am trying to get my head around how the parallax window works so that I can make sure ModelConverterX can render it and be used to add it to a model. But I am a bit puzzles on how the second UV channel is used to select the right portion of the behind window texture. Looking at some default MSFS model it seems there is still some processing of the UV coordinates. Having a more simple model might help me to get my head around it.