HDR / PBR / compositor info

Copying Stuart, I thought I'd fork off this thread, on some info on HDR / PBR / compositor modelling.


> On 27 May 2026, at 14:25, Willie Fleming <[email protected]> wrote:
> 
> Should I even bother trying to get various AIs to search and summarise on all mentions of HDR and related terms across the wiki, the FG site and forums?

I wouldn’t worry about creating a summary (AI or otherwise) yet, first you need to build some understanding of the pieces, eg by reading:

	https://arqive3d.com/blog/game-ready-3d-assets-pbr-workflow-2025

(I just found this by Google, there’s many other tutorials)

Blender also has many excellent tutorials in this area, and tooling to help with PBR texture creation. Unfortunately ‘Substance Designer’ which is the best-in-class tool here is an Adobe product now, I guess most people will not rush to subscribe to that :)

For the rest of the terminology, I would simply use Google (etc), no AI summary needed. You could dig into the details of what the compositor does:

	https://gitlab.com/flightgear/fgdata/-/blob/next/Compositor/HDR/hdr.xml?ref_type=heads

… but I don’t think it helps at all with asset creation: it’s enough to know that we implement a standard PBR renderer, exactly which passes the compositor currently runs and why is an implementation detail, unless you are keen to help with the implementation!

We definitely do need an FG-specific guide, but only where we deviate from ‘create PBR-ready assets in Blender’, so if you can make your model look good in Blender’s PBR preview (or any other glTF loader which uses the PBR materials), it’s going to look good in FlightGear, because, well, PBR :)

And also note that an aircraft is probably not a good first project to tackle if you’re new to Blender, maybe start with a static model and work up. Fortunately even aircraft are ‘easy’ compared to natural / organic models.

Kind regards,
James

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