Feature request: alternative propeller animations (for realism and VR)
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Can you please consider providing alternative propeller animations for people who prefer realism ("transparent disc") over the present "cinematic" animations ("motion-blurred blades")?
This would be especially helpful for VR users: we could enable reprojection (aka Motion Smoothing or Asynchronous Spacewarp) which can improve the VR experience greatly on real-world hardware (as opposed to "fairy tale hardware" that uses graphics cards which are popular with cryptocurrency miners). Also, it would mitigate certain distortions caused by the Asobo graphics engine (try flying the Arrow in VR at 2400-2500 rpm on a cloudy day).
Here's a thread about this on the official MFS forum:
https://forums.flightsimulator.com/t/propellers-and-reprojection/339525The OP explains the issues VR users are having:
Looking through the propeller, the scenery turns to quivering jelly, and even parts of the fuselage flicker about. This seems so unnecessary as the blurry rotating propeller is actually a simulation of a strobe effect that occurs when filming and is no representation of how it looks in real life (the R in VR). Could we please have the option for a fixed semi-transparent disk for the propeller, which would be more realistic and would not mess up the reprojection.
Here's a link to a mod that provides alternative prop animations for some default aircraft. The mod seems to mitigate the issues by increasing the transparency (I cannot test this in VR at this time):
https://flightsim.to/file/3412/10-propeller-mods-for-the-fs2020-standard-edition
This is not what I'm looking for. I'd prefer it if the motion-blurred prop blades were gone for good.Here are discussions of the topic unrelated to flight simulation:
https://www.aerialcombat.co.uk/2012/02/what-do-spinning-props-look-like.html
https://oikofuge.com/how-to-model-rotating-propeller-discs/Oikofuge puts it this way:
So what I want to see is a transparent disc of the correct propeller colour(s), with the colour density at each radius matching the relative amount of prop blade and empty space at that radius.
Thank you for taking this request into consideration.
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The image I'm looking at when sitting in the cockpit could be ARROW_EXT_PROP_BACK.PNG.DDS.
Let's assume I find a way to turn this into the transparent disc I need -- I don't know yet how to do that, but I'm working on it -- can I do that with Gimp 2.10.18? I checked and it seems to be able to export to DDS with mipmaps. Can someone tell me what format and compression to use? Or where to ask questions like this?
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Ah, nevermind. I turned off the alpha channel and there's something weird "hidden" in the color channels. I imagine the color channels are used for something related to PBR or reflectivity or whatever. I think I don't know enough to do what I tried to do, and I have little ambition to become a livery painter.
Well, perhaps JF will show mercy.
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@aurel I've been editing textures with GMIP successfully, just make the changes, and do File > Overwrite [filename] and it will use the same format as the original. I will play around with the prop textures to see if I can make them smoother. I see the weird stuff you're referring to but I'm going to ignore it and see what happens (that stuff could just be compression artifacts)
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@vcapra1 said in Feature request: alternative propeller animations (for realism and VR):
Try this texture
Thank you very much. <3
While this isn't 100% what I hoped for -- I believe, for realism, the disc should be less transparent towards the center -- it still works perfectly to get rid of reprojection artefacts! And thanks to your advice, I think I can reproduce this for the other aircraft I'm flying.
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@aurel Yeah, I agree. I found it really confusing trying to understand how the game interprets the color and alpha of the image, because even when I used a gradient with solid black as the inner color and fully transparent as the outer color, you could barely see the difference. If you manage to figure it out, do let me know because I still can't seem to get it to look darker in the middle
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@vcapra1
Damn. That's perfect! Thanks. It looks 100% realistic to what the eye sees (maybe not a camera). It also has no VR repro artifacts.You've solved a big realism issue for me, as well as a practical problem. You should upload this to flightsim.to so it gets wider appreciation!
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@BufordTX said in Feature request: alternative propeller animations (for realism and VR):
You should upload this
Tbh, I think we should keep asking JF (and all other publishers, including Asobo) to include realistic prop animations with their models; at least as files that the user can rename or copy to activate.
Remember when we nagged game devs about lens flares breaking immersion until they caved ? Now the "lens flare on/off" option is standard.
Cinematic prop animations are so 2006.
