Simming in 3D

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Postby toprob » Wed Jul 30, 2014 8:34 pm

I installed the latest Nvidea drivers today, and although they 'break' tesselation in Prepar3D, they gave me back my 3D in FSX and Prepar3D. This is just simple red/green glasses, from the $2 shop. This works best from the cockpit, and the effect can be quite breath-taking. It seems to keep me more distance-aware, so I can fly between trees, for instance, without having to guestimate how close I am to disaster.

Here's a shot from FSX:



...and one from Prepar3D, which I took to make my point that photoscenery can certainly have plenty of sticky-up bits to fly around -- this is the autogen from the first pass over the Hawke's Bay photoscenery I referred to in the screenshot post about photoscenery...



I don't know if I'll leave these drivers installed, and wait for the next beta which might fix the tesselation, or revert to the previous drivers as I like my tesselation... In the meantime I'm freaking myself out hanging up here in the air, quite a novelty for someone like me who is afraid of heights.
Last edited by toprob on Wed Jul 30, 2014 8:35 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Postby Ian Warren » Wed Jul 30, 2014 9:46 pm

I maybe a visit to the $2 dollar shop tomorrow ... lucky have one just across the road.
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Postby gojozoom » Thu Jul 31, 2014 9:31 am

Hey Rob,

I'm keen to try this. Any performance impact?

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Last edited by gojozoom on Thu Jul 31, 2014 9:32 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Postby cowpatz » Thu Jul 31, 2014 9:40 am

What does Tessellation do for you Rob? My understanding is that it passes some of the 'work' to the GPU but I have not really noticed any change in FPS or smoothness with a change of the slider.
What exactly should happen. I am running a Titan card so I would have expected to see a significant change in something.
Remember the 50-50-90 rule. Anytime you have a 50-50 chance of getting something right, there's a 90% probability you'll get it wrong!

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Postby toprob » Thu Jul 31, 2014 11:14 am

gojozoom wrote:
QUOTE (gojozoom @ Jul 31 2014,9:31 AM) <{POST_SNAPBACK}>
I'm keen to try this. Any performance impact?


Probably. Since I needed to turn off tesselation, I can't really compare. Just flipping 3D on in P3D reduced fps by about 10-15%.


cowpatz wrote:
QUOTE (cowpatz @ Jul 31 2014,9:40 AM) <{POST_SNAPBACK}>
What does Tessellation do for you Rob?


The main differences for me are the terrain shadows (they are a bit broken without Tesselation), and ground detail -- up close the ground doesn't have the detail texture without T.
I wonder if your GPU might do the extra work without T, since it's a lot more powerful than mine, so you might not see such a difference.

By the way, I've reverted to the previous drivers, just to get my Alps shading working properly again. The news is that a driver fix for this is not far away, so I'm happy to hang up my 3D specs...

EDIT: here's a comparison, showing the broken terrain shadows.

Last edited by toprob on Thu Jul 31, 2014 11:22 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Postby omitchell » Thu Jul 31, 2014 11:32 am

Reminds me of 1986 or 87 when Tv2 put Godzilla on TV in 3d and you got the glasses for the family with a KFC family pack lol
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Postby Kamoflarj » Thu Jul 31, 2014 4:29 pm

omitchell wrote:
QUOTE (omitchell @ Jul 31 2014,11:32 AM) <{POST_SNAPBACK}>
Reminds me of 1986 or 87 when Tv2 put Godzilla on TV in 3d and you got the glasses for the family with a KFC family pack lol


Gho-ho! heh
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Postby richbarry » Thu Jul 31, 2014 10:07 pm

Someone correct me if I'm wrong, but aren't the 3D graphics cards and programs like IZ3D just taking the 2 dimensional FSX image and performing their own 2D to 3D translation of the image in the same way my projector can do 2D to 3D conversion?
I found the 2D - 3D interesting, but it hardly blew me away.

If you have a 3D projector or TV that handles Side by Side or Over Under streams, then do this. It will blow you away.

Add some new camera views to either your global camera.cfg or the individual aircraft.cfg
Below are a L & R spot view. Left has InitialXyz set to -0.1 and Right has +0.1 to give eye offset. In close up VC type views, I found something like 0.03 was better.
I've also been experimenting with InitialPbh = 0, 0, 0 changing the last heading number so the left eye looks at 0.5 degrees and the right at 359.5 so that they converge in the distance, but I can't see a discernible difference from having both at 0.

Make 2 new windows, undock them, then use Autoit to run the script at the bottom to position the windows perfectly on your second screen/projector. Make sure you put the correct view names in the script. You could size and position manually if you were very careful, but AutoIt makes it easy.
In the script, (-1920, 0,960,1080) (x,y,w,h) -1920 is the left edge of my projector 960 is half the width for SBS display, 1080 is full height. Adjust values for your resolution and screen position.

You now have Native, perfectly crisp, 3D FSX......

OK, there is a minor downside currently. FSX auto adjusts the content of your 2 half screen width screens to keep the content in proportion, then the projector stretches them out to fill the screen. I'm still trying to find a way around this, but at present the beautiful 3D quality over rides that fact the aspect of the picture isn't correct. Set it up and see what you think. Better still, solve my problem and get back to me!

The other little pain is the 2 images need to pan in sync. There is a item in the Views controls that you can map to a key. Views - Sync All or something to that effect, but it seems a bit temperamental and sometimes moves in harmony and sometimes doesn't. I'm yet to work out the pattern.
If you do get your L & R stereo images out of sync. Close one eye to see that image, close the other eye to see the other image, and adjust one or the other to get them lined up again.
Also, I imagine in VC that if you pan too far left or right, that the stereo effect will be lost, as the 2 views are rotating at fixed points, not around a centre point. I haven't verified this.

Have fun. The bizzare thing is I can't find any reference at all on the internet to anyone else having done this. So many are missing out...


[Cameradefinition.014]
Title=StereoL Spot
Guid = {BCA3FDD1-FB83-4BBA-8407-4922A7F0DA3C}
Description = This is the description of the spot view.
Origin = Center
SnapPbhAdjust = Ordinal
SnapPbhReturn = False
PanPbhAdjust = Swivel
PanPbhReturn = False
Track = FlatChase
ShowAxis = No
AllowZoom = Yes
InitialZoom = 1.0
SmoothZoomTime = 2.0
ShowWeather = Yes
InitialXyz = -0.1,0, 0
InitialPbh = 0, 0, 0
XyzAdjust = FALSE
Transition = Yes
ShowLensFlare=TRUE
Category = Outside
ClipMode = Spot
PitchPanRate=30
HeadingPanRate=24
PanAcceleratorTime=0

[Cameradefinition.015]
Title=StereoR Spot
Guid = {BCA3FDD1-FB83-4BBA-8407-4922A7F0D06C}
Description = This is the description of the spot view.
Origin = Center
SnapPbhAdjust = Ordinal
SnapPbhReturn = False
PanPbhAdjust = Swivel
PanPbhReturn = False
Track = FlatChase
ShowAxis = No
AllowZoom = Yes
InitialZoom = 1.0
SmoothZoomTime = 2.0
ShowWeather = Yes
InitialXyz = 0.1,0, 0
InitialPbh = 0, 0, 0
XyzAdjust = FALSE
Transition = Yes
ShowLensFlare=TRUE
Category = Outside
ClipMode = Spot
PitchPanRate=30
HeadingPanRate=24
PanAcceleratorTime=0

---AutoIt window positioning---
WinMove ( "[CLASS:FS98FLOAT]", "StereoL Spot - View 01", -1920, 0,960,1080)
WinMove ( "[CLASS:FS98FLOAT]", "StereoR Spot - View 02", -960, 0,960,1080)
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Postby NZ255 » Sat Aug 02, 2014 3:10 pm

I bought a pair a while ago to try this out (not your pictures Rob), but could never get it to work for me. I've just noticed perhaps it's the glasses - The red filter cuts out all the blue, but through the blue filter I can still see some red.
Can you confirm the blue filter should cut out all the red for your pair?
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Postby Splitpin » Sat Aug 02, 2014 6:29 pm

those screens give me a headache blink.gif
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Postby toprob » Sat Aug 02, 2014 10:30 pm

NZ255 wrote:
QUOTE (NZ255 @ Aug 2 2014,3:10 PM) <{POST_SNAPBACK}>
I bought a pair a while ago to try this out (not your pictures Rob), but could never get it to work for me. I've just noticed perhaps it's the glasses - The red filter cuts out all the blue, but through the blue filter I can still see some red.
Can you confirm the blue filter should cut out all the red for your pair?


I've only got these screenshots here to go on, as I reverted to earlier drivers, and today I cleaned out most of my screenshot folder... but yes, the blue filter doesn't show any red at all. You might be able to fine-tune the colours in the driver setup, but once again, I'm missing that from my current drivers.
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