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Wake effects in P3D

Dimus

Dimus

SOH-CM-2025
Not wanting to clutter the F-14 thread at the FSX forum I thought I'd ask the great minds populating this area.

As many have experienced, 3d swells in P3D make the wake effects that are aligned to the surface look weird:



I tried editing the fx file and increase the offset of the particles in order to raise the effect's level above the surface. While it looked like it worked in Arno's effects editor it does nothing in the sim.

Do you guys have any suggestion about wake effects in general in this sim. Every single one displys this problem (including other carriers and ships).
 
There's nothing you can do about this.
The problem comes from the fact that the wake effect is a totally flat texture, while the water surface is not flat.
You could try to raise the wake effect to ensure it always sits above the highest possible wave, but frankly, that would look terrible as well.
You could lower the water quality to make it flat again, as a workaround....
 
Daube said:
There's nothing you can do about this.
The problem comes from the fact that the wake effect is a totally flat texture, while the water surface is not flat.
You could try to raise the wake effect to ensure it always sits above the highest possible wave, but frankly, that would look terrible as well.
You could lower the water quality to make it flat again, as a workaround....
Click to expand...

That's what I tried to do, raise it, but was not successful. Whatever values I tried in the y offset in the fx file had no effect in the sim. If you know how to do it I'd appreciate a suggestion. For a big carrier I think it would be OKish, and in any case better that what it is now.

I haven't tried other ships so far. I found this video though that claims that the effect is offset by default in the Beaver floatplane:


I am not at my desktop now to try the Beaver and see but maybe for this plane the attachment point of the effect is raised in the mdl itself.
 
I find this a real spoiler for the otherwise amazing 3D waves! In my eyes this is one the top things for LM to fix in the next Prepar3D release. What I'm hoping for is some means of replacing the default 2D wakes with 3D wakes, or even better a means of projecting the 2D wake onto the 3D wave surface. The latter would mean 3rd party developers wouldn't have to recompile their models, which in turn would mean many FSX boats would remain compatible with Prepar3D.

I'm currently creating my own boats for Prepar3D but have yet to find a means of creating a 3D compatible wake in the SDK... unless someone knows different???

Andy
 
I fully agree. However, for shooting approaches on a carrier, the current simple 2d effect would work fine and be much better than the blobs on the water you get now. Is it simple to offset the wake and how one could go about it? Changing the value of y-offset for the particles in the fx file did not work. I may go ask at FSdeveloper.
 
I have been testing a couple of Wake effects for some of my ships based on particles; it works decently but still some testing to do. The problem is that you need several emitters to make it work and you have quite a job to adjust them to each model. Maybe I can post some screenshots in the weekend.
Henrik
 
Please do!

I don't mind working on adjusting an effect to a specific model, provided of course you wish to share your good work. In any case, it is great to see people working to make effects compatible with this great feature in this sim.
 
Thanks for this HU flaviossa. I sure hope that by effects they refer to the wake too.

Oleboy, it seems that the same workaround is used for helo effects. It is raised slightly above the waves.
 
Thanks, I'll check out the file later at home. However, it seems from the screenshots that the water surface is flat so the developer probably is not using the 3d tesselated water.

Edit: I take this back. The video clearly shows 3d waves and the wake showing just above them. The fx file entries show the emmiters and particles with small y-offset values. I will see if they can be applied to the carrier wake effect.

Thank you jetsreamsky. The effects in the download are also really nice. I will consider applying them to floatplanes in my hangar.
 
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