General brightness of ground objects

[Machinist]

Being TS2012 all about lights, I'm very disappointed with RW3 routes HSC and NEC! mostly objects don't reflect lights like trees, and there is a minimal permanent bright light in the scene even if you choose a stormy heavy rain (or night storm) in winter at midnight, which was good in RW2 but not desirable (IMHO) with RW3 and its new headlights. Some sort of trees (but used a lot in NEC beside the tracks, for example) are opaque, don't change the brightness even if lighted with a point light and especially with loco headlight (spot light).

Is this carelessness and inattention? or is to save fps?
Is there something that can be changed in objects files to make them reflect light, or make their brightness vary when the environment is lighter or darker? or is this a unfixable texture problem?

The same to the sky domes, it looks like don't matter if you are under a full moon at midnight (clear weather), or in a heavy rain storm night (suposedly very dark) there is a minimal and same brightness in ground scene, which makes me feel running legacy mode even with TSX on.

Is there a way to get a really dark dome at night? not only in the sky, but also in the ground?

Thanks,
Lisboa.

[Kali]

You can definitely make the ground pitch-black; what I'm not sure is if you can make the moon/clouds make any difference.

Leafy20122.jpg

Trees I have no idea, maybe they need a different shader.

[Machinist]

Not that black!

How did you get that?

[GreatNortherner]

Hi,

You need to edit the color settings in the TimeOfDay blueprints to do any lighting changes. So this works on a per-route basis easily. You can, for example, use the Big Horn ToD (Time of Day) BPs on your route, you just need to edit the RouteProperties.xml file. This way you can also get rid of the orange/brown night sky on many of the old Rail Simulator routes.

However, it should be noted that some lighting parameters will get overridden by the weather blueprints (similar to what happens to the distant mountain colors in the terrain texturing BP).

A pretty thorough walkthrough for the ToD BPs is available in the RW Wiki: http://www.railsimdownloads.com/wiki/ti ... e%20Manual

When editing night lighting, the obvious colors are the sky gradients, so very dark blueish black with a tiny bit of (dark) silverish tint on the horizon could be used for the break of dawn, for example.

However, the moonlight color setting is also important, this will always illuminate the ground and all objects when the moon is above the horizon. So don't set this too bright! And also make sure to not set this to any strange colors or strong brightnes during daytime, or the moon will actually light up the ground!

The other, slightly less important settings are the ambient light, uplight and backlight. Try to use natural looking colors here and subtle amounts of brightness, and at night, hardly use any at all.

Hope this makes some sense.

Cheers,
Michael

[PapaXpress]

I also spoke about some of this on my blog:
http://thegradecrossing.blogspot.com/20 ... art-4.html

[Machinist]

Thank you Michael and Papa,

In meantime of my last post, I sucessfully tried also some changes in the weather bin files, and adjusting the colors (especially darkening fog parameters) helped a lot to make overall scene's brightness darker.

I'll look carefully into yours tips and tricks as well.

Thank you very much.
Lisboa.

[Kali]

The default ToD files seem to have way too much backlight/uplight/ambient and not enough direct, for normal sunlight - shadows are far too diffuse. What I can't remember is if you can change those in the weather so you can have more diffuse light in cloud ( as the light source is much bigger ) and more direct in sunlight.

[Machinist]

Hi Kali,

You hit on the nail, as usual. What I was chasing was a darker "ambient" (BP) light at "night" and "midinight" (ToD BP). On NEC, for example, almost all the seasons have a too much bright light at night (about 30% of white) and reducing it to something like 1% gave me the effect I wanted. The problem is that the changes are in the ToD files (applicable to an especific route template bin file), which means cannot be used only in a particular scenario (unlike the wheather files).

Cheers,
Lisboa.