Blade Blur Discussion

[MrMinimal]

Thank you so much for looking into this and even sharing your findings on GH!
I am from Godot-land and have been in awe by DCS's implementation too, currently working on an open source flight sim project.

The Apache's blades you mentioned in the Unity Discussions thread are what still make me wonder about implementation though. Because they do change according to the swashplate position.
Could be same tech they use in their WW2 Propellers (unlisted video).

Given how dynamically it reacts, it reminds me of nothkedev's brute-force solution (playable web demo included) but I doubt that performance is great with hundrets of transparent meshes.

MSFS has an approach where they use a disk and a fan of sprites from the sides, which works but doesn't respond to blade pitch changes or light dynamically:

I'd love to discuss that. Have looked into how ED did blades by any chance too?

Greetings from Germany

Tom

[zulugithub]

Hi Tom,

I haven't took a closer look at the propeller blades so far. But I see, that there is a "-..\DCS World OpenBeta\Bazar\shaders\enlight\airscrew.fx" file in the installation, where you could start with.

Greetings from Germany
Zulu

[MrMinimal]

I looked into DCS's airscrew.fx shader and contacted the developer of it via mail.
It's works by duplicating the same mesh multiple times and rendering those duplicates in a transparent manner ontop of eachother.

In my test repo I replicated the effect:
https://github.com/MrMinimal/testing-prop-vfx

My problem is, the performance is abysmal once it fills up a lot of the screen:

I'm not great with shaders to increase the efficiency but in case someone finds use for my repo I wanted to share.

Cheers

Tom