Aces High Bulletin Board
General Forums => Custom Skins => Topic started by: Widewing on May 01, 2005, 01:26:36 PM
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I noticed that prop blades are shown with each blade being successively darker than the first. Why is that? Is it a bug?
The Master blade looks ok, but the next blade is darker and the third blade appears totally black.
(http://home.att.net/~c.c.jordan/FadingProps.jpg)
My regards,
Widewing
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It looks to me like it might just be due to the time of day. From the shadow of the plane, it appears to be noon so the sun is shining down from above. Looking at the #2 engine on the left of the pic, the blade pointed to 8 o'clock therefore has its forward face with the logo on it facing kinda upwards. The light hits it and shows off the details. The blade pointing to 11 is mostly parallel to the light, with just enough of an angle to catch a little. Thus, it's darker but you can still see the logo a little. On the blade pointing to 3:30, however, the forward face of the blade is in shadow and thus very dark. It's the same for the #1 motor, with the difference being the outboard blade is the lightest due to the angle of the blades being different for the counterrotating props.
I bet if you kept the plane in place and just changed the time of day, you'd see different blades as lighter and darker as the sun's angle changed. Thus, IMHO, all blades are probably equally bright in the absolute sense, and only the lighting and shadow effects from the sun make them appear different in this picture.
This is another great thing about the skin viewer. Before, I was always having to change the time and go to differently angled runways or taxi around to face different directions just to see various parts of the plane clearly. No matter where you are or what time it is, some part of the plane is either too shadowed or has too much glare on it. But you can avoid that completely with the skin viewer ;).
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Originally posted by Bullethead
This is another great thing about the skin viewer. Before, I was always having to change the time and go to differently angled runways or taxi around to face different directions just to see various parts of the plane clearly. No matter where you are or what time it is, some part of the plane is either too shadowed or has too much glare on it. But you can avoid that completely with the skin viewer ;).
It's in the skin viewer that it looks perfect. However, whn you see it in the game, it looks rather poor.
That is why I wondered if it was some sort of rendering bug in the game.
My regards,
Widewing
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Well, I still say it's mostly the result of the time of day when you took the screenshot :). The darkness and lightness of the various blades corresponds to their angle relative to the sun, with the blades with the most sun exposure being the brightest and those in their own shawdow being the darkest.
Seems to me the light in the film viewer isn't as intense as the sun in AH. The glare doesn't seem as bad nor the shadows so dark as they are in the game. I've also noticed that in-game sun effects are worse at both ends when you're dealing with a bare-metal plane. For them, the glare is worse and the shadows blacker than for a painted plane. And of course, the specularity stuff in the materials.txt file affects the whole plane, so painted parts get the ultra-shiny/ultra-black treatment along with the bare metal parts. I don't know how the film viewer deals with the materials.txt file, or if it even looks at it, but regardless, the film viewer seems more natural than the all-or-nothing sunshine in-game.
Try this: Go to a medium field and use the east-facing runway, or taxi at any field until you're facing east. Then set the time for like 0645 so the sun shines on all blades almost equally. I bet that solves the apparent problem. Then try it at a field with a mountain close in to east or west, face that way, and try again. Although the mountain doesn't cast a shadow, it cuts the direct glare effect considerably, so if the 1st time you had glared-out blades, now I bet they look as they should. Remember what field you used here and use it from now on when looking at skins in the game.