I’m working on a small local GA airport and was wondering from the more seasoned developers - what is your experience with the detail level on your buildings? For example, this particular area has a unique hangar that isn’t found in the default models (gable roofs or gable cross).
While I’m at it I decided to re-learn Blender and Substance Painter and having a blast. So my question is how much detail should I be building into the model so that it doesn’t affect performance. So here are specific questions:
1 - What is the “best” size for the textures (I have them at 4096 but wondering if having 60 hangars will kill performance - 1 doesn’t but I’m still working on the model so can’t test it yet and hoping to get some experienced comments.
2 - I usually bevel the edges of models to make them look more realistic (I’ve worked professionally on our development projects with Sketchup) - sharp edges look fake. Is this a bad idea for performance?
3 - Most of these hangars have a gooseneck lamp outside the middle front - if I add it will it kill performance?
4 - Was thinking of creating 3-5 variation types to not make them all look the same. Good or bad idea?
5 - I’ve come across occasionally comments about hi poly, lo poly version - can anyone point me in a good direction to understand the need for this in an airport scenery - any of you have ideas of this?
Hope some of you could help out this noob. Really enjoying the process and would like to avoid some of the pitfalls. Thanks in advance. Cheers!
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No feedback yet, so hoping this might entice some discussion. Here’s the rendering of my model I’m working on in Substance Painter. If I go to 2048 it looses a lot of the detail of the vertical channels. As it is it’s not that smooth as I’d like it to look. I ended up removing a roof vent fan, a gooseneck light in the front and an air conditioning wall unit in the back because Blender UV mapping was being very weird and I’m still trying to learn how to adjust them. So is this too much detail (or not even necessary)? Am I just adding overhead for little rewards?
I went and really studied the default models that come with dev standard - and see a wide range of detail. In some, door frames are modeled, in others doors are images, but windows are modeled. It’s interesting to see the variety of strategies and wonder if there is a method to the madness.
Thoughts?
Another question I have, is does anyone know if MSFS uses “instances” of models? In other words, if I have the one hangar instanced 20 times, does it make any difference as opposed to having 20 different hangars (colors, numbers ,etc). Just wondering again, how much detail should (could) I decide on adding and not affect performance.
I don’t really have answers to your questions, but I can comment on the way I work for MSFS, compared to previous sims. I’ve developed for all the MS sims and offspring since FS2002, and modelling goals have certainly changed:) At the moment I’m working on a MSFS version of an airfield which I first built for FS2002 a long, long time ago, and since completely rebuilt from scratch for FSX/Prepar3d. I started with 512x textures, each with around four hangars, moved to 1024x textures per hangar for FSX, and now I’ve gone to 2048.
The 2048 textures are a bit of a compromise, but I like to build textures the old-fashioned way, with my own photos, and now I use a combination of Materialize and hand-editing for PBR.
Anyway, the point I want to make is that if your buildings are roughly similar to the one shown, then I wouldn’t worry too much about adding geometry, it isn’t as if each one is hundreds of thousands of vertices. With MSFS I have started to model a lot more detail for what is probably a similar airfield to yours. In the past I’ve relied on the photo texture for doors/windows etc for buildings further away from the taxi area, and used basic geometry for those up close to the viewer. Now I’ll model everything, including lights etc.
I’m not sure if my project would be affected if I went to 4096, but I’m not going to take that risk. And since I don’t paint my models using a PBR tool, I can’t just re-export at 4096 to test it out.
I don’t use Blender, so I’m no help with mapping, sorry.
Thanks Godzone…I did a test of 4096 vs 2048 and didn’t find any visual difference at something like 20’ away. Even closer it looks very decent - so that answers that question. The nice thing about Substance Painter is that you can change the resolution on the fly (since it’s mostly procedural) so I can always up it if I need to, but from that test 2048 is more than good enough. Thanks for the feedback - I’ll use what you are saying. Cheers!
Hi, I’ll try to answer even though I’m really late here. I’m somewhat new in developing scenery, since the past year, mainly in previous gen sim (~P3D).
My building detail is high at where it needs detail, e.g. main terminal, apron, jetway, etc. It’s where sim players mainly wandering around. Other extras I made them low poly count because it’s mainly just there for immersion, just a few hardcore players that went to the toilet inside MSFS 
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For textures, I use higher pixel count at those detailed building, and smaller texture size for extras to conserve GPU memory. Also consider draw count (number of textures that need to be called when sim is rendering the airport). Obviously smaller means higher FPS, just balance it to quality.
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I used sketchup for the past ~15 years. I’ve never used bevel edges, but if that means better quality why not try it? Adding a plane roughly only increase 2 polygon count. Not that much considering a study-level aircraft cockpit will have hunderds of thousands even millions of polygon. I don’t think it’ll give high impact on performance.
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Try to keep poly count lower. Add it if you want, but don’t give too much detail. Good outline will do.
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Just play with texture, you can use same UV map but different markings, colors, etc. Not that much of an impact for a small airport.
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I only design every object once, since it’s already a burden to work on one haha. I try to keep poly count reasonable, like doing not too detailed bevel, choosing which object to be recreated in 3D or just 2D, classifying the importance of object, should I design it well, or just simple extras. You’ll understand along time, and by trial and error, looking at your finished design inside sim and doing correction here and there. Trust me it’ll take a long time to create something good.
Last but not least, don’t stop learning and don’t be shy to ask. Sometimes people are good, sometimes people are lazy to help. But if you don’t ask you’ll never know
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