Light maps are super powerful - way better than what RTX on the best GPU can do.
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My impressions of lighting. A lot of the following points are this particular model, and not the capabilites of the game / shaders in ms-fs.
The blur throughout the video is very forgiving. Hides lighting, surface material shading, less detailed textures etc.
There's so many blur sources! Persepctive blur, motion blur (when the camera moves quickly), and the HDR blur making bright bits glow against a darker background.
Overhead console panel
It's hard to see exactly how the overhead console lighting comes from. Part of it's just blur. There's probably some lightmap there too. The glow should mostly light up the knobs and surfaces facing away from it like the seats. The dark surfaces in-between the glowy bits shouldn't recieve too much light, if any. There's some light contribution from.
Quick youtube search: Boeing 777 cockpit setup from dark state
The cameras used are just set up to roughly show what's going on. They aren't setup to accurately record lighting, and perform dynamic range compression. The eye can see a much larger range of light levels, and there's heaps of automatic processing involved. Also eye specific blur like the airy disk doesn't get recorded by cameras.
At
2:20-ish the overhead panel is pretty dark. There's not much light contribution from the outside in this scene it seems.
Main instrument panels
The shading of the brown panel surface (not instruments/Display) looks a bit flat or one shaded. There should be a tiny bit more variation - from light bouncing around the cockpit (if the model was a lightmap heavy implementation, or there was better image based lighting implemented), from some grime/wear and tear depicted in a fresnel map or specular/metallicity map. Just a sense of material roughness would help - this looks a bit smooth (a lot of PBR game studio output tend to look plasticky due to too much specular component from looking through youtube).
PFD Displays rendering
There's an anti-glare treatment, but the outside light does get distributed at various angles. Adding a cokpit environment map, even if the reflection effect is very slight, would make it a lot more convincing.
Quick youtube search gives: Daytime 777 (
link), night 747 older displays, but shows cockpit light relfection (
link), cockpit interior reflection on glass at
2:53There's also no dust unlike FG, and there's no blur due to the circular apeture of the eye simulated.
It's a nice model and reasonable lighting. The passenger cabins are nice, and there's no videos of them being done to any quality. The MS-FS engine is descended from an openworld game engine and is only DX11 - so compared to what GPUs can do these days it's not really advanced. It also doesn't have much specialist engine work done on rendering with cockpit interiors for flight sims in mind.
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What hardware is capable of these days
For an idea of how much hardware processing capability has improved, see rendering demos in engines like unity, unreal, cry engine. The problem with these game engine demos is that their shading tends to be in game style - a bit painterly (
e.g. scenery trailer)/cartoonish rather than realistic. For games, being cartoonish can actually help the visual communication, since it helps players easily distinguish the things they are shooting at from the environment - whereas in a sim issues distinguishing from the background are a carefully simulated feature - so the goals of games are different. Consoles were severely limited or rapidly outdated in the last generation (AMD has a hardware monopoly limits competition) . A lot of PC game techniques are also driven by console sales and capabilities - e.g. companies won't create designs which use CPU/GPU techniques that are central to the application/gameplay - e.g. gameplay in the last console generation that relied on a particle/fluid sim. VR and console competition between MS/Sony, may mean consoles keep up better this time around. From videos of rendering in youtube, some games also seem go for the lowest common denominator instead of supporting older techniques for older hardware, so sometimes they can be very cartoony and lag behind, especially in multiplayer oriented games. Games also have massive amounts of movie effects/blur - sometimes to hide visual issues. The hardware/tech has improved /far/ more than can be seen in DX-11 MS-FS videos .
It's a bit difficult to quickly search tech demos created with realistic non-cartoony style (not sure of a good search term). There are some demos set in a realistic architecture type visualisation setting, usually with common building or nature materials. Cockpit interiors have very different materials. A photo-realistic tech demo set in a factory or industrial setting would be closer, and some sci-fi settings might contain a more suitable/realistic material style.
But these give an indication of how far hardware has come (quick youtube search):
Unreal Engine 4.1 - Sci-Fi Hallway Tech Demo - GTX 780 Ti - 2013 hardware - some surfaces are cartoonish. There's not much dirt, film deposits etc. although there are scratches:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X7tYC62ncnkCryENGINE 3 Baron Haussmann Interior SVOGI DEMO - 2015 - 4k/60FPS - wrong type of materials, but shows what is possible. Think of cockpit materials with something like this fidelity.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OI7yP0ANY70Unreal Engine 5 and 4 Photorealistic Project - ( R2 House Pack )
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rzjqAgh9bN4SciFi Space Interior Environment | UE4 Asset Pack Demonstration - cartoony
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ru5pcSWBNgwAdam | Unity - game engine. Exteriors have a more realistic style. Parts of the robot exteriors are cartoony - plastic looking BDRF. The bright cartoony bits of the robot exteriors contrast with the more realistic concrete - only bits of the video has good shots of the robots against the background, as there's a lot of perspective blur - see:
img to see some contrast in game rendering styles. Since this is a game demo, parts of the robots have bright saturated colours to make them easily distinguishable - the colours would end up being indicative of the robot's capabilities or something in a game.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GXI0l3yqBrA&t=136sKind regards