Orbx’s John Venema has taken to the Orbx forums to tease two new images which show off Orbx’s first True 100% PBR airport. The team have been working with their new in-house development team Turbulent Aviation on creating an “end-to-end” workflow for creating airports with PBR. This workflow has also been established to allow the creation of P3D/XP11 airports and release them at the same time, or thereabouts.
Whilst the airport these screenshots come from is not yet known publically, the teasers demonstrate the detail the new PBR technology can inject into the sim without the cost of performance.
The original high-end model consisted of over 24 million polygons. That number of polygons on a simple part of the airport would indeed cost a huge amount of performance. However, the new PBR technology and workflow established by the Orbx teams means the same level of detail can be accomplished without the need for such a high-polygon model and it’s been reduced significantly to ensure performance is still high for flight sim users. To achieve this effect, they create a PRB map for a lower poly target.
Of course, it’s not just the detail that will be impacted by PBR, but also the lighting. With every element of the scenery taking advantage of PBR, it means that light will reflect realistically. This will change depending on the time of day, cloud coverage, wet from the rain and more.
Orbx have confirmed they won’t be revealing the true identity of the airport in the screenshots until the specific product is in beta testing. This should be either at the end of April or early May.
We may give away a free copy of the airport to someone who guesses it correctly in our comment section below! Have fun speculating.
You can read the full forum thread on the Orbx forums. The last airport released from Orbx was their Olbia Airport (LEIO), which is available for $39.95AUD on the Orbx website.
