Realistic Clouds

[LizLemon]

1 hour ago, rowdyb00t said:

@LizLemon

 moon looks nice. I’m not sure if you fly in VR or not, but the moon looks too small from your sun mod ( I’m assuming you changed this). Also the stars are a bit to bright making them look too large. Is it possible you can check this out and maybe correct?

 

The moon in game has an apparent size of nearly 2 degrees. Its size should be just over 0.5. The mod fixes the sun and moon size to be approximately correct.

[rowdyb00t]

I see. Maybe it’s my ipd settings, it looks too small in vr

[Blooddawn1942]

So I finally tried the mod. What can I say. Incredible, there´s no way back to the vanilla clouds, even if they have improved the look with the new extreme setting.

[LizLemon]

Try this - for summer maps

 

light.zip

[AstroCat]

2 hours ago, LizLemon said:

Try this - for summer maps

 

light.zip 1.57 kB · 2 downloads

Curious what this does, and actually where do I put it to try it out? Thanks!

[rowdyb00t]

@AstroCat

  light.bmp will go in the summer cloud file. Save a copy of the original just in case you don’t like it. 

[AstroCat]

6 hours ago, rowdyb00t said:

@AstroCat

  light.bmp will go in the summer cloud file. Save a copy of the original just in case you don’t like it. 

Ahh.. I see where it goes, thanks!

[rowdyb00t]

 

Updated first post with V6.1

just messed with some cloud shapes that bothered me

[peregrine7]

1 hour ago, rowdyb00t said:

 

Updated first post with V6.1

just messed with some cloud shapes that bothered me

 

Are the ambient light issues from v5 fixed? Those were a bit broken.

Thanks for your hard work on these ( @LizLemon, you too).

[rowdyb00t]

@peregrine7

   Ambient light is fixed

[rowdyb00t]

 

I’m currently working out of town this week in Kansas and got some neat pics of the Sky I thought I’d share. First one is from yesterday and the second one is from now. 
  

[OrLoK]

fireball in second pic???

[rowdyb00t]

14 minutes ago, OrLoK said:

fireball in second pic???

Fireball??

[OrLoK]

8 minutes ago, rowdyb00t said:

Fireball??

zoom in, right hand side above horizon

 

[rowdyb00t]

@OrLoK

 

   Ha I see it now. It’s a smudge on the cab glass 

[Beebop]

On 11/19/2019 at 11:06 AM, rowdyb00t said:

 

Skyplow Mod!  ?  Is this how to plant a rain forest?

Edited November 23, 2019 by Beebop

[rowdyb00t]

 

Working on some of the heavy clouds.

[Beebop]

?NICE work!?

[HappyHaddock]

4 hours ago, rowdyb00t said:

 

Working on some of the heavy clouds.

 

Can I assume you've got around to looking at reworking the cloud maps? I've spent ages trying to develop simple tools and add-ons for my graphics packages to aid this sort of work.

 

[Picchio]

5 hours ago, rowdyb00t said:

 

Working on some of the heavy clouds.

 

The color of the sky is a bit... strange. The tone of the overall lighting isn't convincing, when looking at the sky and at the land. Cloud shapes look fine, though!

Edited November 24, 2019 by Picchio

[Goffik]

I've had to disable this mod for now, because I'm playing the career mode and it's midwinter around Moscow. It means I get that horrible banding in the clouds even around midday because the sun is still so low.

 

This has lead me to notice another issue though, with distant clouds. With this mod enabled the distant clouds look rather pixelated in VR, as if AA is having no affect on them. Since I've been using this mod so long I hadn't really noticed, but using the vanilla clouds now I immediately noticed that this pixelation was completely gone. Re-enabled the mod just to check, and sure enough it was back again.

 

I'm not sure why this is happening or if there's anything you can do about it, but I just thought I'd mention it.

Edited November 24, 2019 by Goffik

[rowdyb00t]

2 hours ago, HappyHaddock said:

Can I assume you've got around to looking at reworking the cloud maps? I've spent ages trying to develop simple tools and add-ons for my graphics packages to aid this sort of work.

 Yes, I repainted a few of them. 
 

1 hour ago, Picchio said:

The color of the sky is a bit... strange. The tone of the overall lighting isn't convincing, when looking at the sky and at the land. Cloud shapes look fine, though!

  I haven’t changed anything with the lighting. The pics were taken with the sun at about 5pm in autumn. Now that you say it, it does seem gloomy but, I checked these clouds against all times of day and they seemed good. I’ll post some at different times of the day  
 

@Goffik

   It’s possible that your cloud samples in your graphic presets is too low. When the devs updated the clouds, they changed them to 64 from 128. This will make the banding more noticeable. I’m not sure if this is the problem but here ya go https://forum.il2sturmovik.com/applications/core/interface/file/attachment.php?id=77652. You can make them what ever you want 128, 256, 512, 4096, ext. 

   Let me know if that’s the problem. I have never noticed this as you explain, other than the normal amount of banding.

[rowdyb00t]

 

12pm                                                                     6pm

 

 

                                                                           

 

 

 

Edited November 24, 2019 by rowdyb00t

[LizLemon]

The suncolor and ambientcolor in ski.ini will do strange things to the cloud colors. They should probably be made the same across all the sky.inis for consistencies sake. 

 

The lighting on the cirrus clouds is kinda broken in the stock game and you really can't fix that without changing the shaders.

[rowdyb00t]

I feel like the terrain needs a little more contrast, it can be very dull. Especially the trees with their lighting. In each ski.ini file I’ve tweaked the fog color and reduced the fog density in most. Also the ambient lighting on the clouds however it seems hard to achieve something that is sufficient. 

[LizLemon]

Ambient lighting is hard because it is 'tweaking' the ambient based on the ambient values in ski.ini

 

Landscape can easily be brightened by editing the detail textures the landscape uses. Just make them a bit brighter or more contrasty.

[HappyHaddock]

1 hour ago, rowdyb00t said:

I feel like the terrain needs a little more contrast, it can be very dull. Especially the trees with their lighting. In each ski.ini file I’ve tweaked the fog color and reduced the fog density in most. Also the ambient lighting on the clouds however it seems hard to achieve something that is sufficient. 

 

I may be sounding like a stuck record here as I've said this many times before but the real challenge with changing any one thing within the look of the natural world in this sim is that it can impact on so many others; both from a technical point of view through shared parameters within the coding, but also from a perception point of view as the human eye/brain cannot judge things in isolation but only through how they contrast with others around them.

 

This is why you really need to address changing everything to maintain balance as if you simply change one thing you are affectively pushing the problem somewhere else rather than eliminating it.... In many cases the things that can look like problems are often the parts that are most accurate and life like simply being spoiled by the look of others around them. A lot of addressing issues with the lighting in this sim can be counter intuitive, whereby you can get better results not by lightning the thing that looks too dark. but by darkening the stuff around it if it is everything else that is actually too light. 

[SAS_Bombsaway]

 

 

Those are with your mod on. Thank you for your work. 

[Goffik]

@rowdyb00t

 

I have my cloud samples set to 1024. I've been using that value for some time now. It does reduce the banding but it's still very obvious with your mod enabled, and ruins immersion for me. For some reason the vanilla clouds seem less susceptible to the banding issue to the point where I barely notice it.

 

Also, the pixellisation issue on distant clouds is not new. It was simply conspicuous by it's absence when I disabled your mod for a while, so when I used your mod again I couldn't help but see it everywhere. I'll see if I can get some screenshots of what I mean, but no guarantees because what I'm seeing in VR is often somewhat different than what's on my monitor.

[rowdyb00t]

@Goffik

  

I’ll look in to it when I get home. I’m working out of town currently. I don’t recall noticing this in winter. 
   My samples are set to 128 and my cloud settings are set to high. 
shadows high

no ssao

full dSR

aliasing 2 

no HDR 

sharpen on

 

try those settings. It might have something to do with the winter lighting also. 
   Can you try an earlier version? Let me know. 
 

Edited November 25, 2019 by rowdyb00t

[vonGraf]

10 hours ago, Goffik said:

@rowdyb00t

 

I have my cloud samples set to 1024. I've been using that value for some time now. It does reduce the banding but it's still very obvious with your mod enabled, and ruins immersion for me. For some reason the vanilla clouds seem less susceptible to the banding issue to the point where I barely notice it.

 

Also, the pixellisation issue on distant clouds is not new. It was simply conspicuous by it's absence when I disabled your mod for a while, so when I used your mod again I couldn't help but see it everywhere. I'll see if I can get some screenshots of what I mean, but no guarantees because what I'm seeing in VR is often somewhat different than what's on my monitor.

 

I have jagged edges on distant clouds (more or less at the horizon) too as if the anti-aliasing isn't working there anymore.

[rowdyb00t]

22 minutes ago, vonGraf said:

 

I have jagged edges on distant clouds (more or less at the horizon) too as if the anti-aliasing isn't working there anymore.

Is this something you noticed on the last version of the mod?

[vonGraf]

20 minutes ago, rowdyb00t said:

Is this something you noticed on the last version of the mod?

 

No, it's there all the time (I'm playing in 2D) and with all the cloud mods/settings I did use before as well. It's not a big problem but a constant flickering of the bottom edges of the distant clouds.

Everything else looks quite good and much better with your mod now.

[Goffik]

@rowdyb00t

On 11/25/2019 at 4:50 PM, rowdyb00t said:

My samples are set to 128 and my cloud settings are set to high. 
shadows high

no ssao

full dSR

aliasing 2 

no HDR 

sharpen on

 

try those settings. It might have something to do with the winter lighting also. 

 

Those were the exact settings I was using. I bumped up the samples from 128 to 1024 to try and reduce the banding further but didn't notice much difference.

 

On 11/25/2019 at 4:50 PM, rowdyb00t said:

Can you try an earlier version? Let me know. 

 

I will try an older version to check the banding again when I get a chance.

 

As for the antialiasing issue, that has always been there since I've been using the mod I think. (I started using it at v2.) @vonGraf's screenshot does a good job of showing what I mean. It's even more noticeable in heavy cloud, because the aliased edges stand out even more when there are other white clouds behind them.

[rowdyb00t]

On 11/25/2019 at 9:31 PM, vonGraf said:

No, it's there all the time (I'm playing in 2D) and with all the cloud mods/settings I did use before as well. It's not a big problem but a constant flickering of the bottom edges of the distant clouds.

I took a couple of flights last night ( VR ) and could not see any flickering. I wonder if its the graphics settings somehow and is everyone having this problem?

   On another note I’ve been giving the clouds more depth and I am toning down the brightness. It seems they are way to bright and have no depth. 

Edited November 27, 2019 by rowdyb00t

[vonGraf]

2 hours ago, rowdyb00t said:

I took a couple of flights last night ( VR ) and could not see any flickering. I wonder if its the graphics settings somehow and is everyone having this problem?

   On another note I’ve been giving the clouds more depth and I am toning down the brightness. It seems they are way to bright and have no depth. 

 

Flickering edges means the aliased bottom edges of the clouds, in case it wasn't clear enough, English isn't my first language.

[rowdyb00t]

@vonGraf

 

   I understood you, thanks to the pic. I’m not seeing that. I will check again when I’m off work 

[Redwo1f]

3 hours ago, rowdyb00t said:

@vonGraf

 

   I understood you, thanks to the pic. I’m not seeing that. I will check again when I’m off work 

 

Not seeing that either.

[rowdyb00t]

@Goffik @vonGraf

 

    I think that I might have found the problem. In the graphic presets the lines here in Balanced Settings :

//Post effects
    post_effects_enable=true
    post_bloom_enable=false
    post_contrast=true
    post_sharpen=true
    post_drops_enable=true
    post_hdr=2
    saturation=0.80
    post_motion_samples=16;

 

 I've highlighted the ones that I changed to remove aliasing. Here is my Gpresets attached. Try this and let me know if 

this is of any help.

 

gpresets.zip

Edited November 28, 2019 by rowdyb00t

[Beebop]

With most recent version and "gpreset" installed I'm getting slight flickering at bottom edges of clouds where the cloud line meets the distant fog.  It's hardly noticeable and frankly I'd rather have that than the stock clouds this mod is that good. But if I could get rid of the flicker I'd be in Hound Heaven.

Graphics Settings: see attached

startup.cfg gamma set to .7

Lapino Summer Map

Mission weather:

10AM

Heavy clouds at 2000m