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MSFS20 Texturing help

M

MisterMarsch

Messages
16
Country
austria
Hello, i need some tips/advice on how to texturing correctly. I made a hangar and textured it in blender with pbr materials, created uv‘s, baked it down, created a composite and so on. But at the end my textures seems to be washed out. I baked it down to a single image with 2048x2048 and it does look bad.

When i look at other airports from like gaya, orbx etc. they all use most of the time 2048 by 2048 and even have larger buildings on the map (uv) but they look crispier than mine.

What do i do wrong? Am i missing something?

Help would be nice. Thanks in advance!
 
First thing that comes to mind: be sure you reduce the Specularity in the Material settings -- towards the top of the basic Blender material settings, not in the msfs area. Probably want it around 1/5th of the default setting.
 
I know but that‘s not the problem. My baked map isn‘t as good as some of the well known developers like gaya, orbx etc. So i want to know how they get it done to bake full buildings and even more on a 2048x2048 texture map with minimal quality loss? And also some hangar doors. Like how can i make an metal large hangar door with seamless textures do not repeat?
My Workflow is:
Selecting the face which i want with my texture on it
Put the pbr albedo in the msfs albedo
Metal to the msfs channel
Normal in the msfs normal.
Then i bake every single texture out on the uv map
For the metal, ambient occlusion and roughness i bake seperate maps out and combine it via rgb in gimp to get my composite

then i delete all textures and plug all baled textures in the right msfs channel.

that‘s it so far.
But my quality is very poor even if i have bigger faces like walls and doors etc. set bigger on the uv map
 
I would suggest that you use 2 filenames of the model. The 1st filename of the model for procedural texture creation and a 2nd filename of the model for placing/ using the completed textures to compile for MSFS.

The 1st filename of the model would be where the UV layout is created and the textures that you create through Blender only (all bakes). The 2nd filename of the model would be using the MSFS Toolset as well as the UV layout of the 1st. This would make It easier to edit the textures, if need be, within the 1st model (not having to delete or backtrack anything because of changes). This will also eliminate the additional nodes created with the procedural textures, which could cause problems when compiling. There are some differences in lighting, etc within Blender compared to MSFS for sure.

There are many tutorials out there for Blender that show how to use Blender like Substance Designer/Painter.

EDIT: Actually you don't need to use the model pre-say to create the textures, but a simple plane (or multiples thereof) when using the procedural method.
 
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First, what makes you think that the professional developers don't use repeating textures? Baking textures has its advantages but it also limits the resolution of the resulting image to the texture size. If you have a large terminal building with a 200 metre long front Wall and Bake it into a 2048x2048 texture map would give a resolution of around 10 cm per Pixel which might be sufficient if seen from afar but up close it will look blurry. I only bake texture sheets for small or less important objects, for the buildings directly in the pilots view I use several image textures, some of them as seamless repeating textures to improve resolution, especially for large roofs and walls. To distract from the repetition you can use detail textures to mix with your main texture or you place some smaller clutter objects in front of the wall to divert the eye from focusing on the texture repetition.
As for the baking itself, be sure to check your cycles rendering settings before baking. For example, the default setting is to bake color, direct and indirect light into the texture. This will bake Blenders default low level ambient world light into the texture which will make it look dark and dull, so be sure to uncheck the direct and indirect light before baking. If you want you can send me your blend file to take a look at your settings.
 
Thank you for you tips and advices! Maybe my expectations are a little too high. I want it all crisp and unique but yeah.
I will look at my cycles settings. Direct and indirect are always unchecked. What i never have tried is the detail texture msfs node. Can i put a grunge texture in there si that it‘s on top of my wall texture?
I have not so much sparetime but i try all your advices out and will let you see the result so you can tell me maybe what‘s wrong or not.
 
Short update: I have checked Substance Painter and after a day of checking it out, this is the way to go! The baking of SP makes such a difference in quality then baking in blender. SP is also relatively easy to use for making stains, dirt etc. You can even assign when you put a sign on a wall on which map it should be baked too. Modeling in Blender and Texturing in SP, that makes fun :)
 
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