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The reason for HDR requirement


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Hi,

This is just a comparison to show the difference between HDR activated with adjusted values and without.

My values below.

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22 minutes ago, mopperle said:

Thanks Alexander, and just to make it clear: the dark pictures represent HDR turned OFF.

 

In my case, its dark with HDR turned ON.

 

I use Envshade if this can be a factor, but on other planes the colors are fine.

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4 minutes ago, ComSimPilot said:

 

In my case, its dark with HDR turned ON.

 

I use Envshade if this can be a factor, but on other planes the colors are fine.


The CRJ Pro is designed against the current version of P3Dv4 with full use of PBR for surfaces outside and in the cockpit. Any shader changes the reflectiveness values and color temperatures and therefore has a negative influence on the appearance on you screen. Things that my look better from a scenery or weather point of you also  changes the reflection an shadows in the cockpit and therefore we recommend not to use any shaders and use mild HDR settings.

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8 minutes ago, metzgergva said:


The CRJ Pro is designed against the current version of P3Dv4 with full use of PBR for surfaces outside and in the cockpit.

 

why against? Is this a typo?

 

It doesn't make sense as it requires the latest P3Dv4 HF2.

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2 minutes ago, ComSimPilot said:

why against? Is this a typo?

Not a typo, but more a translatation that can be misunderstood. He meant that the CRJ was devloped according to the latest SDK from LM.

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vor 54 Minuten, ComSimPilot sagte:

 

In my case, its dark with HDR turned ON.

 

I use Envshade if this can be a factor, but on other planes the colors are fine.

Any "shading plugin" is more or less like photoshop contrast effect which alters the final rendered image. Those were initially thought to beef up FSX content but not do well in the more complex HDR setup coming with Prepar3D. FSX had a fixed dynamic range, so more or less the overall brightness of a pixel in a texture remained all the time the same. Those had to be designed in base much brighter than what HDR in combination with PBR demands to deliver correct results. It would be up to the plugin makers now to update their algorithms to fit the new conditions. We had already a lot of discussion about that. But at first comes sim and provides a base on what we work as developers with. Secondly we design our material to get a possible realistic result using what the platform delivers us by default. And then come the 3rd party plugin makers who do their business on their own. They are not in contact with Lookheed, not in contact with the product designers, but if they want to spice up the material they have to change the workings of their product to the new condititions. Thats why you can go with some aircraft (mostly old FSX aircraft, many ports to Prepar3D use simply old FSX content) and more modern variants get complications (they dont make it i want to underline here). We work with new technology that changed the input for those 3rd party shaders too! Now as the base brightness was higher with FSX, they brought the resulting image more down. And no, adapting our brightness values is not a trivial task and will not happen and you cannot make a texture setup for any shading plugin out there. I count at least four of them now, able to differentiate the settings even more locally. Can you imagine how many "not fitting" variants you can generate with that? That many people not understood yet. They should push TomatoShade, PTA and "what the names are"-producers to go into drive-mode and update their software....

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2 hours ago, ComSimPilot said:

 

In my case, its dark with HDR turned ON.

 

I use Envshade if this can be a factor, but on other planes the colors are fine.

There was an Envshade update released when the NGXu came out since the it's cockpit was dark as well when using Envshade.

Maybe if it is reported in their forum they will release an update for the CRJ as well. They also added some shadow setting in their latest update which is supposed to cope with these situations.

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Just for anyone's' info, after learning that I should use HDR (had it off), all was fine color-wise in the cockpit, but when I popped outside all was shades of gray.  I tried all kinds of remedies (delete shaders folder, reinstall P3D client, etc.).  No change, still shades of gray when outside the cockpit.  It had been a year since I installed a fresh copy of P3D, so I uninstalled everything everywhere.  Now I'm at the point where I've only installed P3D (nothing else) and the CRJ.  The cockpit looked great with HDR enabled, then I popped outside and... shades of gray!  Chaseplane was still installed.  I looked under "Preferences/Camera" in the Chaseplane window and "Enable HDR Overide" was enabled.  I disabled this and now outside all is in living color!  Oh, well.  Forgot to check that and a fresh install is always a good thing.  Love the bird!

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Hello guys,
 

On 11/26/2019 at 2:49 PM, Stefan Hoffmann said:

Any "shading plugin" is more or less like photoshop contrast effect which alters the final rendered image. Those were initially thought to beef up FSX content but not do well in the more complex HDR setup coming with Prepar3D. FSX had a fixed dynamic range, so more or less the overall brightness of a pixel in a texture remained all the time the same. Those had to be designed in base much brighter than what HDR in combination with PBR demands to deliver correct results. It would be up to the plugin makers now to update their algorithms to fit the new conditions. We had already a lot of discussion about that. But at first comes sim and provides a base on what we work as developers with. Secondly we design our material to get a possible realistic result using what the platform delivers us by default. And then come the 3rd party plugin makers who do their business on their own. They are not in contact with Lookheed, not in contact with the product designers, but if they want to spice up the material they have to change the workings of their product to the new condititions. Thats why you can go with some aircraft (mostly old FSX aircraft, many ports to Prepar3D use simply old FSX content) and more modern variants get complications (they dont make it i want to underline here). We work with new technology that changed the input for those 3rd party shaders too! Now as the base brightness was higher with FSX, they brought the resulting image more down. And no, adapting our brightness values is not a trivial task and will not happen and you cannot make a texture setup for any shading plugin out there. I count at least four of them now, able to differentiate the settings even more locally. Can you imagine how many "not fitting" variants you can generate with that? That many people not understood yet. They should push TomatoShade, PTA and "what the names are"-producers to go into drive-mode and update their software....

 

I'm the main Envshade developer and first of all I'd like to highlight the fact that our product is totally updated and is fully compatible with full PBR aircraft. Such statements is not fair and simply spread wrong information about another product. There is absolutely no issue or too dark cockpit with the latest aircraft from your competitors which have PBR cockpits, especially with our latest update that brightens cockpits and allows users to control that.

Also the HDR changes made by Envshade are very low, especially during day time as we wanted to provide a natural aspect and not simply eye candy, thus HDR with and without Envshade should not be extremely different at day time.

I've been contacted recently by one of your beta testers and I tried to solve this "issue" with him, unfortunately nothing that controls the cockpit brightness in Envshade actually seemed to have any impact for him on this dark cockpit issue, while the changes affected all the other cockpits including the PBR ones.

 

Something by design is probably different from other PBR cockpits but at this stage, we don't know what it is. I'd be glad to investigate and check what I can do to make Envshade working better with the CRJ as I think abandonning one of both add-ons is quite a pity for your users or our users.
 

 

On 11/26/2019 at 7:35 PM, Mathijs Kok said:

Keep in mind things like Envshade do not know about 'shadows' the only thing they do is change the color the developer/artist intended into another color. 

 

In all due respect Mathijs, this is quite wrong. Envshade is totally aware of shadows and our product is far much more than an HDR color adjustment.

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If Envshade is indeed able to hack into the simulator and detect that an object is shaded and only tweak that single part of the bitmaps, I stand corrected and apologize.  I do maintain however that any tool that changes how our artists see the product is out of our control and will result in a something that we can't support. 

 

As we said so often, we make our products to look best on a calibrated monitor (the simple Windows calibration is fine) and with the settings as advised in the manual.  

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27 minutes ago, Mathijs Kok said:

I do maintain however that any tool that changes how our artists see the product is out of our control and will result in a something that we can't support. 

 

As we said so often, we make our products to look best on a calibrated monitor (the simple Windows calibration is fine) and with the settings as advised in the manual.  

 

Obviously I totally agree with that, supporting each single other product would be a nightmare.
It's usually up to a more global product like Envshade to adapt itself rather than "specific" product like aircraft. I'll check what we can do to enhance compatibility with the CRJ with the help of users.

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Hi Kmax59!

 

Its not about your product especially. We not told our costumers to de-use your product especially. We carefully analyzed what causes us issues reported by our customers and gave a report of the facts faced.

The thing is that not really all PBR-branded "new" cockpits are really native PBR material cockpits! Maybe this situation is also responsible for the "calibration" differences from one bird to the other.

Some are merely swift ports, which majorly used already existing textures that were made for FSX before. Those had to be by nature brighter than the native PBR stuff, as FSX showed them much too dark over the midday times and

devs were forced to overexaggerate brightness there. Many of those will exhibit a better behaviour in NON-HDR environments (which some of the people still stick to) combined with the existing shading presets (as FSX is a NON-HDR environment), as they existed long before

and the FSX product and the 3rd party shader software had years to adapt and grow nearer to each other. But doing two versions so NATIVE NON-HDR and NATIVE PBR HDR isn´t economically possible. Its not simply playing with some rulers and getting out the other version.

Maybe this fact explains why some shading addons work better with those, worse with other aircraft. For the CRJ and the A330 we went they hard way and not overtook existing material. They were made totally new for the NATIVE PBR environment.

 

Usually it works this way:

1. The simulator platform itself defines how the materials will look by their internal and also for us fixed algorithms. That is the basis which all the industry works on. You fit the product to the base platform you work with, be it Unreal Engine, Unity, Unigine, CryEngine and so on.

2. A new scenery or aircraft product has to obey those rules trying to achieve the most realistic look possible with the given tools and rules.

3. And finally there come the shader mods into action (and not before), there can be done polishing to the result of position 2. Polishing should do an addition, an advance to the product, it should not subtract anything from

    the experience. Can you imagine how many posts I had to answer before to make that clear? That was valuable, expensive production time which we lost here caused by all the fans of Tomatoes and PTAs and so on not understanding how

    all those stuff works under the hood and why they got the result they not really loved. Of course the most convinient method to release anger with this half knowledge was to blame the new aircraft products for. The task is now to find a solution together with the 3rd party shading

    software creators to create presets that do work pleasantly also in the new HDR PBR world. If there should be a global preset that works, which is hard to do seeing how dynamic the visual content became with HDR, that would be cool thing for all. Customers are pleased,

    we can simply develop and are please instead having constantly to moderate a forum with angry people and you can sell your mods in peace! We want no different thing!

 

 

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