Railworks America

Community,

I am new to designing and creating weather blueprints. One issue I have is certain blueprints I use for a scenario are that the sky looks great, but it is way too bright on the ground. Or, the sunset sky looks beautiful but the ground is way too extremely dark. In blueprint editor I don't see any where while editing or creating a new weather blueprint where you can adjust the lighting of the Ambiance world.


Is anyone good with weather blueprints?


What is the difference between creating a Blueprint BP or Blueprint extension?

Hello,

To get the best effect from custom weather and lighting, you should look into two blueprints: TimeOfDay BP for the general, daytime and season related lighting, and Weather BP for the clouds, weather effects or any potential overrides like fog.

TimeOfDay (one for each season), is mostly self-explanatory in the BP editor although it has quite a lot of settings in it. The crucial settings for the overall (object & terrain) lighting are Back Fill Color, Uplight Color, Ambient Color. I recommend setting each of those to some extreme rainbow colors to see first hand what they really do in the sim.

The weather blueprints (or SilverLining blueprint for 3D weather) can then influence the general lighting set in the TimeOfDay by using the fog override and setting a fog color and distance in the weather BP. This is by the way the most common cause for "glowing white horizons" in night-time scenarios, using a weather pattern that has a fog override enabled.

Cheers
Michael