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Recreating Light pole wash

Bigfoot

Bigfoot

Messages
47
Country
netherlands
I'm trying to recreate the light wash of the standard Lightpost in FSX.

I made my own model of a light pole (correct name: Floodlight) with Sketchup. Got it in MCX into FSX through ADE.

The only thing I'm having a problem with is the light wash texture on the ground. All the other texture ain't a problem.

I made a poly on the ground and the material is the wash texture of the stock light pole. In MCX I linked it with the material editor to the actual texture files. Also looking at settings as discussed here(http://www.fsdeveloper.com/forum/threads/33mo-leaming-field-lighting-progress.19286/).

I've now got a square which has opacity as I can see through it in FSX(bit of asphalt and concrete apron visible in the picture). But not the "wash" the stock lights have(on the left in the picture). It also flickers which i need to fix.

Lights.png


Does someone know the secret on creating this?
 
It is a consequence off your light pools' overlapping. You can incrementally change the altitude of each pole slightly and that action will put the conflicting planes on different levels; however there are other consequences to this work around. Another solution is to reduce the size or scale of your light poles so that the pools do not overlap.
 
Thats not realy the problem i'm having.

I've done some endless adjusting. Below you see the result. Two more things that I want to adjust. You still see the square. The black towards the edges is fully transparant. (i think the transparantcy isn't blended.) And second, it can be a bit more brighter.

Floodlight.png

I found this thread but the settings are not working for me. I'm using the stock texture of the lightpole_wash object which utilizes alpha.
 

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It is odd because I have done the exact same procedure, more or less, through SU and MCX using the default FSX light as a basis; without the same consequence. Interesting effect though..
 
What I think is needs to happen is that the alpha layer is the mask for the non alpha layer.
Whereby the black of the alpha layer needs to be fully transparent.
 
It looks to me like the outer edges of the alpha channel need to be blacker while the center needs to be lighter. The extreme edges of the alpha should be pure black to avoid seeing the square shape of the texture.

Something like this (before & after):

alpha_before.jpg
alpha_after.jpg
 
That's weird because it's using the FSX Acceleration texture light_post_wash.dds. The poles on the left in my first post are those stock light poles that use this texture. And the original outer edges arent visible in those. I'm guesing they are absolute black at the edges.

Here are both rgb and alpha of these colors. I think it should be rgb underneath and masked by the alpha.

Light_pole_wash.png
 
Yes it does appear that the alpha is transparent at the edges of that texture. Strangely the LM variant of that texture has a pure white alpha channel? (although I see you're not using it) Are these stock lights the ones located in FSXP_FillerObjects.bgl BTW?
 
Yes correct. My thought were; that stock light is proven, so must easy to use. But turn out not to be the case. When I attach the LM to this the result is worse. What setting makes the LM go underneath the alpha of the diffuse texture? Maybe that makes it a lot brighter.
 
LMs usually overlay the day texture rather than replace it entirely when it gets dark so my only guess is that the day texture's alpha channel somehow continues to be used after dark. I would have thought the day texture's alpha would have been completely black making it totally transparent and the night texture's alpha would then do the alpha blending and supply the light glow. At least that's probably what I'd have tried if I were making a light splash. Live & learn I guess :) .

You can "steal" the material settings off the stock light and apply them to your own model, click the little green jigsaw puzzle icon in the MCX material editor then click the down arrow next to "New" and choose LIGHT_POST_WASH. On the right type a name (LIGHT_POST_WASH for example) and MCX will save those settings as LIGHT_POST_WASH.mcxmat in the ModelConverterX\templates folder. Then you can load your light object, assign the textures, and apply those material settings in the same manner you'd apply "set default transparent".
 
Your Brilliant!

That's a new trick for me and it worked!

more Yeah.PNG


Under certain angels they flicker a bit. I guess the height of 0.01 isn't high enough.

Thank you so much for your help.
 

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