Distant buildings, in direct sunlight, get incorrectly brighter the further away from the camera they get. Screenshots included

[V4nKw15h]

Example 1: How non-photogrammetry buildings look when NOT in direct sunlight. Clear sky. No cloud shadows.

Not bad. Looks pretty realistic. Now let’s turn around 180 degrees and have a look.

Eww. That’s not looking so good. The sun is lighting the buildings and the ground below them differently. Notice how the further away a building is from the camera the more illuminated it looks but the same problem is not happening with the ground textures.

Take a closer look at the nearby buildings. They actually look okay. The lighting and sunlight seems relatively natural and realistic whenever it’s on buildings closer to the camera. BTW, I did thoroughly check that this effect moves over the city based on where the camera is. The buildings in the distance are not really lighter if you fly up to them for example. It’s a rendering issue.

Why is this? What’s going on?

Take another look at the distant buildings. Notice there are no textures on distant building walls; they are completely smooth. It also looks there’s no self shadowing, or really any type of shadowing as buildings get further away. That all makes sense though. That’s how optimization works, but the unfortunate result is that it makes buildings look much too bright as they get further away.

The reason why is also relatively obvious. If we take away all the darker texture features and shadows from a surface then of course it’s going to appear lighter. This seems to get magnified even more when in direct sunlight. I think this is because those non-textured surfaces are also getting way more specular reflection effects applied to them than they should for the same reasons as already mentioned.

This was always a thing, even before SU5, but now with the reduced draw distances it’s right in our face and impossible to ignore. It just looks really wrong on an instinctive level even if you weren’t aware of why before. Anyway, I’m not here to complain, only to share the observation and hopefully drum up a bit of support to nudge Asobo towards recognizing that this is ‘a thing’ that should be investigated.

Fixing this issue via some shader or texture tweaks would make all those ugly distant buildings blend properly into the background like they should without adding any extra detail to them. Right now, they just look like overly bright boxes in the distance.

This city is Santiago, btw. I’ve got a few more example pics if anyone is interested.

[Squibby6134]

I actually think the opposite, the photogrammetry is unnaturally dark in the distance and doesn’t seem to match the scene lighting.

Is the Autogen lighting perfect, I agree that it is a little too light in the distance but not as bad as the photogrammetry.

It’s actually one of the most glaring things with photogrammetry areas, aside from the major colour shift and darker textures.

[ArcanePython931]

When the sun is low (you show that) and you have it shining from the back i.r.t. your camera direction… the front of (all) buildings is lightened up and the streets are less lightened… that is because the angle of light comes in smaller for the street… and light reflections will not reach you. Agree with Squibby’s remarks… in fact photogrammetry-buildings are quite dark… they only reflect light when the sun is very low on the horizon. I hope reflections look better on DX-12 and I wonder if the XBox image would be better… also when reflection is pixelated… there are not enough XBox-X images yet, to compare !

[V4nKw15h]

I agree with you both about photogrammetry cities too. They have their own lighting issues but I’ve never found them as jarringly bad as what I’m highlighting here for the autogen buildings. That is unless we are talking about a city like Tokyo with photogrammetry surrounded by bright autogen buildings.

Here’s another, probably better example showing how closer buildings are always darker. And distant ones get brighter.

If you look closely you can even make out that the darker buildings actually form a square shape around the camera not a circle. This square of darker buildings visibly moves with you as you fly over the city. If you want to see this exaggerated, turn the Terrain Detail slider down to 10 and watch all the bright buildings in the distance vanish to leave a square of dark buildings around the camera.

[Squibby6134]

I think I see where you’re coming from, it’s likely that the shadows and / or ambient occlusion isn’t rendered at range so the buildings appear lighter. Obviously extending shadows out that far is going to have a major impact on performance so it’s likely something we’ll have to live with unfortunately. Maybe Asobo could be convinced to provide a slider to extend shadow range for those with the graphical horsepower.

Also from my observations it seems the game handles photogrammetry as a texture / terrain item instead of a 3D model which may explain the odd lighting differences.

[V4nKw15h]

I wasn’t suggesting that shadows are extended out further. I was simply suggesting that the amount of sunlight applied to building surfaces be reduced for more distant LOD proxies. In reality that would be happening naturally as the sunlight is being absorbed by dark surfaces or bounces light away from the camera when hitting uneven surfaces. The super flat, non textured surfaces are simply bouncing back unnaturally high amounts of sunlight.

The solution could be nearly free, as far as performance is concerned, if it was a tweak to the lighting algorithm in the shader. Might even be as simple as reducing the PBR shaders glossiness based on distance. BTW, I would like to see them do something similar for rivers too which also reflect way too much light for similar reasons.

One of the reasons I chose to make this thread now is that Asobo have said they are looking into fixing the washed out colors in SU5 and this is one of the reasons for that. It’s only showing up so badly now because the low level LOD buildings are now being drawn much closer to the camera.

The tweak I’m suggesting would allow them to keep the lower LOD buildings, and performance gains, but have them blend more convincingly into the environment.