Just a thought...
Time of day, or TOD, is getting quite nice now.
I was thinking however that Ruud's implementations of colour variances and so forth throughout the day are not always ideal. I feel midday is too yellow, and dark nights are too 'light'
Anyway, I feel generally Ruud will never get his right because there is no right or wrong. Different places in the world will feel different. A city might be best with an orangey ambient glow in the night for example. These are things artists can tweak to set a mood.
Also, mie and rayleigh will change as the time of day changes, and ideally we should be able to artistically set these too.
I still believe Racer should have an auto mode, no doubt, but for those who want to delve deeper, setting them up would be nice.
So my quick thought was a LUT (look up table) drawn in curved. Have four of them. One for ambient vs time of day (0-24 on X axis, ambient light in Y axis (not sure how you'd do r/g/b yet))
Then have one for diffuse, like above.
Then have one each for mie and rayleigh.
Now when we use TOD, which as said I think is getting nicer if you use really good day/night sky textures, then you can set some lovely dawn/dusk transitions. Some track makers may not want to, that is fine, but the variety will be really nice to have!
Another addition is that currently TOD defines the sun position to the centre of the earth?
Adding lat/long and day/month, and/or even year would be nice, so we can get low-slung winter sun transitions across the sky.
All this is either simple LUT's rather than hard coded variables, or just improving the maths and adding a few constant inputs (for lat/long and date/month)
A more complex further addition, for fun, might be to use the lat/long inputs to control the weather at a location from internet resources, so if it's raining, turn on rain. If it's cold, change the constant in Racer.ini (may be useful in future for engine power and tyre grips?!)
All cool stuff
But LUT's for the 4 variables, diffuse, ambient, mie, rayleigh, would be really nice. My only thoughts are how you'd define rgb for the diffuse/ambient... hmmmm. Makes it less easy unless we have 3 curves for diffuse and 3 for ambient
Dave
Time of day, or TOD, is getting quite nice now.
I was thinking however that Ruud's implementations of colour variances and so forth throughout the day are not always ideal. I feel midday is too yellow, and dark nights are too 'light'
Anyway, I feel generally Ruud will never get his right because there is no right or wrong. Different places in the world will feel different. A city might be best with an orangey ambient glow in the night for example. These are things artists can tweak to set a mood.
Also, mie and rayleigh will change as the time of day changes, and ideally we should be able to artistically set these too.
I still believe Racer should have an auto mode, no doubt, but for those who want to delve deeper, setting them up would be nice.
So my quick thought was a LUT (look up table) drawn in curved. Have four of them. One for ambient vs time of day (0-24 on X axis, ambient light in Y axis (not sure how you'd do r/g/b yet))
Then have one for diffuse, like above.
Then have one each for mie and rayleigh.
Now when we use TOD, which as said I think is getting nicer if you use really good day/night sky textures, then you can set some lovely dawn/dusk transitions. Some track makers may not want to, that is fine, but the variety will be really nice to have!
Another addition is that currently TOD defines the sun position to the centre of the earth?
Adding lat/long and day/month, and/or even year would be nice, so we can get low-slung winter sun transitions across the sky.
All this is either simple LUT's rather than hard coded variables, or just improving the maths and adding a few constant inputs (for lat/long and date/month)
A more complex further addition, for fun, might be to use the lat/long inputs to control the weather at a location from internet resources, so if it's raining, turn on rain. If it's cold, change the constant in Racer.ini (may be useful in future for engine power and tyre grips?!)
All cool stuff
But LUT's for the 4 variables, diffuse, ambient, mie, rayleigh, would be really nice. My only thoughts are how you'd define rgb for the diffuse/ambient... hmmmm. Makes it less easy unless we have 3 curves for diffuse and 3 for ambient
Dave