Why il2 landscape lighting is so dull at noon? - Printable Version

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+---- Thread: Why il2 landscape lighting is so dull at noon? (/showthread.php?tid=71109)

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Why il2 landscape lighting is so dull at noon? - lowfighter - 04.08.2010

It bothered me for a while. I think many of us like flying early morning or late afternoon. Lighting of the landscape is pretty nice then. But if I fly close to noon, no matter how nice are the textures on the map the landscape has that dull, flat appearance. The game fails to render theat beautiful sunlight bright reflection which we all know from real-life flights etc. It helps maybe if the textures themselves are brighter but still it's not enough and I don't know what is missing. Any ideas?
Avala has pointed out that changing landlight.mat parameters we get different lighting of the landscape. I experimented a bit with it and I think it can help rendering noon lighting but I'm not sure..
It would be great if more people would experiment with it and post their findings...
Anyway any ideas, maybe something more subtle to be done with the textures?
I'm not a photography expert! :mrgreen:


Here's the link to Avala's thread on the landlight.mat mod

viewtopic.php?f=25&t=5103&hilit=+landlight+mat+Avala



EDIT: see here what I mean looking at two real-life pictures, one which looks like il2 (and that's because the sky is not clear I think) and one which looks like what I want to see in clear weather at noon in il2

http://www.rockymountaintimberlands.com ... 387.lg.jpg
http://www.flickr.com/photos/karstenf/3968571046/

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Re: Why il2 landscape lighting is so dull at noon? - Murph - 04.08.2010

This looks interesting, but unfortunately the link in the thread is dead at the moment. Is there another place you know of where this mod can be downloaded?

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Re: Why il2 landscape lighting is so dull at noon? - lowfighter - 04.08.2010

Murph Wrote:This looks interesting, but unfortunately the link in the thread is dead at the moment. Is there another place you know of where this mod can be downloaded?

Link doesn't work indeed but here's how to create the mod "manually"

Copy this text

[ClassInfo]
ClassName TMaterial
[LightParams]
Ambient 0.2
Diffuse 3.0

paste it into wordpad and save somewhere as LandLight.mat
Locate the folder where the map mods are let's say maybe il2root/mods/mapmods/maps/ and inside that there should be the folder -tex (or _Tex). Put Landlight.mat inside _Tex. Then play with the parameter
Ambient and Diffuse and see how the map lighting changes. The default game parameters are

Ambient 1
Diffuse 1

See what happens with big changes like

Ambient 0.1
Diffuse 30.0
etc

You don't need to exit game each time you change the parameter. Let's say you focus on a certain map, say Crimea. Open the map in FMB save mission with camera play and see how it looks. Then exit play and load some other map say online1. Exit FMB. ctrl+esc to desktop. Change parameters and save. Back to game load yuor crimea mission play it exit..online1 exit desktop change parameters .....The exit and going to other map is in order that the game forgets about the settings he has already for Crimea (it's a feature which speeds up loading of a map)

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Re: Why il2 landscape lighting is so dull at noon? - Fireskull - 05.08.2010

Hello,

I have a couple ideas, in my humble opinion.


In most parts of the world where the sun is high in the sky at noon, the light washes the color into pale tones. This is real life. :wink: The noon sun in desert regions and those near the equator can be almost blinding in brightness. Good photographers know that the prettiest light is in the morning and evening.

I have felt that IL-2 actually does fairly well at rendering this.

The IL-2 Hardware Setup of the Main Menu has the feature to change the land lighting of the sim. I have changed it for certain maps many times. You can change this without restarting IL-2...

IL-2 Land Lighting click path
Main Menu/ Hardware Setup/ Video Options/ Picture Quality/ Custom/ Landscape Lighting


I have always liked the idea of more customization of individual maps according to personal preferences, though things take time to develop. May be that the modders are working on better control of things like this with maps right now.

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Re: Why il2 landscape lighting is so dull at noon? - lowfighter - 06.08.2010

Hi Fireskull,
thanks for your opinions!
I've been for a long time playing with the highest option in the landscape lighting which is the "excellent" option but I'll give a try to the lower options to see what happens.
Not sure I made myself understood, let me try with some other pictures





Ever saw such a lighting like this in il2? (please try to make abstraction of the beauty of the landscape )
Second pic has two different lighting regions. The shadow one, this looks like what il2 renders. Of course the il2 landscape may look brighter around noon, but it still has the "FLATNESS" of the shadowy part of the image. Once again I have no idea what gives the difference?! :mrgreen: :oops: :mrgreen: Need the auto-head-smashing hammer icon badly... :mrgreen:

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