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P3D v3 Runway Light Effect

Christian, if I would have found it back myself, I would have referred to the thread where it is mentioned.
I have not invented it myself but reasoned it through from some source I thought was fsdeveloper but I am not sure.
I cannot be more specific than I said before: make a texture and invert the mipmapping. How to invert it is up to you guys. I use GIMP and ImageTool to do it.
 
Now I understand, thanks Roby :-)

The tutorial you mean, I've read a long time ago. But where I found it I can not say now. But it was about exactly the principle described by you with the MipMaps. But I did not understand at the time. If there is already a good solution, then you could go back to it :-)


Edit
After another (short) search on the net I found the tutorial still. It should be here: http://www.fsdeveloper.com/wiki/index.php?title=Taxi_light
 
I got as far as extracting the mipmaps, and saving them in reverse nomenclature order.....but I have not figured out how to import them to a new texture (thtat doesn't have mipmaps) in reverse order. It seems that when you use the add mipmaps function of imagetool, it automatically orders the mipmaps by size from large to small.
 
It just now occurred to me, this may be a really good technique for 3d city street lights?? Of course I would manage the LODs for them to disappear much sooner.
 
pinkjr said:
It just now occurred to me, this may be a really good technique for 3d city street lights??
Click to expand...
Yes I can confirm that. In a current project, I have placed about 5200 3-D lights as street lights with this LOD texture light method. The loss of FPS is hardly worth mentioning.

point_lights.jpg
 

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Christian, I will provide you a link tonight to my 3D lights so you can give them a try......and even improve :-)

I can see them from 4-5 miles out....which is really as much as I need for my projects. But feel free to modify.

Thanks for your help!
David
 
Thank you very much for your files, David. The data I will look calmly and see how I can use the data for my projects, this will take some time ... :)

Regards,
Christian
 
Christian, while updating my 3D runway lights, I noticed that they glow when precipitation is present. I tried to fix using specular color 0,0,0...but the problem doesn't go away. Tried it with your white lights and they seem to act similarly. Have you noticed it?

Regards,
David
 
David,

without seeing a screenshot of what the glow is, you can not get a good idea of it.

But I just checked against and can not see any problems. Even not in heavy rain. And even with HDR on/off everything looks great:

2017-12-4_18-39-9-738.jpg


I do not know which material settings have your modified lights, so I can not give any recommendation for an improvement.
 
Hi Chris, it appears when you are far out a couple of miles...when the large LODs start appearing.
 
I suspect that you have changed the material settings so far that now desirable side effects emerge. Can it be that you have set "precipitation" in the material settings for the 3d light? This precipitation setting is not intended for lights. It is intended for rain effects on asphalt and concrete, such as the apron area or runways.

Anyway, my lights still look great. Whether near or far, with or without rain. Even with little or much rain, there is no difference in the presentation:

p3dv4_3d_light_rain.jpg

3-D Lights with heavy rain - there is no glowing effect
 
Chris, I will post a pic tonight. The version that I have looks different, much bigger "globes" at zoom level .6 or so. I have not tried them at night, only during day time.
 
robystar said:
Hi,

I am not sure what you mean by LOD's in this context.
The way I explained (or tried to:() is to inverse the mipmaps (i.e. instead of the light point becoming smaller inside a smaller texture size, reverse it so that it becomes bigger inside a smaller texture.
Of course there are more ways to skin a cat but I found this one working as it should.
But, I rest my case:).

Cheers and good luck with your LOD-ding (whatever that means).
Click to expand...

I just read this and realized that Roby had spelled it out. When he referred to "inverse" I thought it meant making the size of the mipmap larger as it went further. Just noticed that inversion is in terms of brightness. Have to do more experimenting.
 
pinkjr said:
... Just noticed that inversion is in terms of brightness. Have to do more experimenting.
Click to expand...

Hi David.

Yes, maybe you can get an even better result from a combination of the LOD system and the inverted MipMaps :-)
Let us know if you could improve something. I am always curious ... :)
 
Hi,

LODs not necessary.
Seems like I gave you a riddle to solve but that is not the case.
Start with a 1024x1024 (or bigger) texture without mip maps, then use a 512x512 one but copy the light source you have in the 1024 in there, etc.
 
robystar said:
LODs not necessary
Click to expand...

You can see it that way or even see it that way. Meanwhile, there are some developers who use the LOD technology. Because it is very easy to understand. Especially younger developers do not always have the patience to acquire a specific technique. That's why I like to make the entire source code available and everyone can see how this technology works. In the best case, the code will be further improved!

What is necessary or unnecessary, then everyone decides for himself :wave:
 
Well, after many hours of testing, I think I came up with a reasonable 3D Light. First, gotta say that working with mipmaps is kind of a pain in the ass! Once you load an _LM texture on Imagetool, you can get rid of mipmpas, but once you try to add them back it creates 9 mipmaps by default. I could not figure out how to add/delete mipmaps...just edit. That being said I made Mipmap 7 pretty bright, and then 8 and 9 I turned to solid white. The results were pretty good, but disappeared at 5 miles at Zoom Level .67.
Following this, I made an LOD model same as before, but with the modified mipmaps. Holy Cow.....can see the light from 20 miles at zoom level .67, and transition was super smooth:
ABO_NIGHT.jpg

I still get the problem of the transparency shining pretty bad on rainy days from far away...looks like lights are turned on:
ABO_GLARE.jpg

Here with clear weather, no issue:
ABO_NOGLARE.jpg

Model has realistic 3d model when near, disappears when far:
ABO_NIGHT_CLOSE.jpg


Hope you like them!
David
 
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