UPDATE, Mar 20, 2023: Found an error in Canopy.msh, wherein one line was missing from the [Faces] section. Archive updated.
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Improved canopy glass, with added armored glass texture, for Vega's v3.3 F4 Phantom. Note that this comprises just the few files related to the glass.
Not being able to test in my game, here's a screen capture from the mesh viewer utility. Note the new separate treatment for the armored glass, with its greenish tint. And the perspex overall has none of the former milkiness nor the odd dark parts.
Get the new glass here:
https://www.mediafire.com/file/lshx0rnboww2ymq/F4_Phantom_canopy_glass.7z/fileFrom the included readme file:
Improved F4 Phantom glass, for Vega's v3.3 full plane/cockpit mod, available here, which you'll obviously require:
https://www.sas1946.com/main/index.php/topic,49144.0.htmlA request came to me to address the awful F4 Phantom perspex. My B.A.T. 4.0 game is WAW-only, and I wasn't sufficiently motivated to install this plane and the other necessary components in order to get it to run. And so I've been limited to checking that things are OK via the mesh viewer utility. And this work was done using a spreadsheet, with those two files included here as well (in Open Office .odf format.)
The changes:
- The perspex has a completely new texture, with much reduced specularity as well.
- The perspex has had the surface normals reversed, as is my usual practice, in service to the concept that shmutz will be more visible up-Sun due to the greater efficiency of forward scatter.
- For the forward canopy, I separated out the armored glass for separate treatment, giving it a greenish tint.
- For the bubble section, I changed completely the texture mapping; previously it was separated into three sections, with visible discontinuities. Now it's one contiguous texture, with no discontinuities.
About the sight's reflector plate
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The original glass.mat and glass.tga files now pertain to ONLY the reflector plate for the sight. I've reduced specularity to zero, so that there's no more silliness where the Sun shining up through the floor can cause incorrect, unnatural glare.
The entire reflector has a yellow hue. It seems to me that unless this glass has an overall tint, due either to dyed glass or the filtering via a dielectric coating, only the reflected image of the display screen should be so tinted. Not knowing about the makeup of this system, I leave the texture as it is.
Adjusting perspex visibility
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If you wish to alter the intensity of the perspex dirtiness, open "GlassCanopy.mat" with any text editor and edit the 4th number for parameter "ColorScale". As I supply it:
ColorScale 1.0 1.0 1.0 0.5 //0.4
The 4th number is 0.5 (an older value of 0.4 is commented out with "//" characters), which is the alpha value. This can range between 0.0 (totally invisible) to 1.0 (maximum opacity, as determined also by the texture's own alpha channel.) To reduce the intensity, make this number lower, and vice versa.
The same goes for the "GlassArmor.mat" file, which controls the armored glass element. Lowering the alpha value will make the greenish tint subtler.
Again, because I can't check things out in the game, I'm 'flying' a bit blind here. You folk are my testers!
WxTech,
Mar 19, 2023
Author
Topic: F-4 Phantom improved glass (Read 2698 times)
