I little variation in the color palette would do wonders… widen the hue range, to reach the red and blue… of course it’s difficult to decide, because widening that range could render things over-contrasted, unnatural. It’s also a matter of simulation… light, temperature, humidity and dust/aerosols/clouds decide together, most of these things are difficult to model. Changing a color is easy… to get it real is the actual challenge.
Have you never seen that? You don’t understand what’s going on there?
Enlighten me… you explain… mist ? why that spheric contrast… and how come there is a reflection on the right ? there’s not enough light for a rainbow. This kind of things is normal for lens effects, not seen in the real atmosphere… I repeat that image
(btw question from previous submit still stands… what’s your issue with the MSFS rendering ? They’ve done their best to find a compromise imho… take into account not everthing is known about these things…)
circle it on the photo so I know what you’re referring to.
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crepuscular rays.
The sun is shining up on high level clouds but a low level cloud is throwing shadow in two places. Thats not a reflection. Its just another place where the cloud isnt blocking the sunlight.
Nope… sunbeams are straight, like the pictures show Sunbeam - Wikipedia
@ArcanePython931 The beams themselves are straight but its just like a picture of railroad tracks or a road where the two side appear to come together in the distance. Its simple “single point perspective” drawing and the sun would be the vanishing point.
At the risk of being belittled by you again, I’d like to present my analogy of light scattering and why the sky is blue.
Consider a playing field – a standard football or soccer field – and the field is covered with obstacles. Players must get from one end of the field to the other without contacting an obstacle.
Higher frequencies of light are like players who zig zag back and forth while slowly making their way downfield. Lower frequencies of light are players who run in almost a straight line from one end to the other.
The players who zig zag the most are much more likely to contact an obstacle ( a particle in the atmosphere) and be either reflected or refracted in another direction - possibly even back out into space.
The light coming from the sun is white but the higher frequencies are more likely to hit particles in the atmosphere and the more particles there are(more particles at lower denser altitudes), the greater the likelihood. The color we perceive the sky to be is the frequencies that have made it to our eyes and this is usually a blue color during daylight hours.
As the sun sets the length of the playing field gets longer and frequencies that made it through during the day are now also being reflected or refracted and so the apparent color of the sky shifts downward in hue down through light blue green and then yellowish and orange.
The atmosphere is like a giant cloud. The sky would be black if there where no particles in it to be lit by the sun. what we see is the result of varying densities of varying collections of various particles being lit by varying light. It wouldn’t be impossible to create a dumbed down model that could impart some very good results and I suspect Asobo are doing just that. Their daytime clouds are already good – I could do without the ash gray piles of cloud that occur (I think they should either make them blue grey or very low sat hue 30(to go with hue210)-- and the sunset cumulus clouds are too monochromatic. I want cumulus clouds that self shadow better and those shadows are blue and they get darker as the sun sets and they have silver linings that turn fiery red (actually hue 270 to 320 I think - water vapor does different things to light than smoky haze)
It is very complicated – you are quite correct. I’m not a meteorologist. I’m not an expert. I am a guy who has spent a LOT of time watching the sky. Please note that what I’ve written here is not the entirety of my thought on the subject(s) --its simply what I’m capable of remembering to write at the moment.
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What’s wrong with trying to improve things? Why must the same people always show up and complain about wishlist suggestions? Sometimes I think it’s the devs themselves posting trying to prevent any further work.
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Definitely… going violet, purple… it will shift (and that’s also accurately modelled in MSFS, palette is a bit narrow, but it looks great) but… how do you explain the color contrast om image #1 ? This circular thing on the left, with a similar “bow” on the right, much fainter… to me it looks like a stain on the lens, or some light effect from nearby, reflecting on the lens. You said it could occur at 200 Ft altitude ? away from street lights and reflections… I think only option would be a local mist, but that does not look that spherical… and contrast will be less on the edge, with mist.
There we are… could’nt agree more ! there is a lack of color contrast now, clouds look desaturated except when the sun shines through. Because there are no shadows, you get low contrast. btw blue clouds would not be applicable in many places… thruth is somewhere in the middle of below two images. To do that correctly with simulation, things like precipitation and temperature must be taken into account… and the altitude of these clouds…
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I’m sorry but I’m really not sure what you are seeing or talking about. There does appear to be a slight bow to the lit areas of the upper sky (just above the dark cloud on the horizon on the right) but I really think its just due to the way the clouds are in the sky (their horizontal and vertical layout).
I said nothing about anything occurring at 200 feet. That wasn’t me.
There is a more curved area right at the brightest part of the picture to the right of the yellowish lit up area but I think thats a camera issue. I could be wrong.
You know, just trying to comprehend the visual appearance tied to all the various stages of cumulus clouds can be quite a mental exercise. They start off low density and diffuse and appear monochrome and dark when viewed away from the sun but can be quite bright if backlit by the sun.
As they grow and become taller and bigger and denser at the top, they will reflect from upper areas and self shadow. They will throw shadows on other clouds whose appearance will be modified. Another low density and diffuse cloud may appear light grey against a blue sky but will appear dark blue against the white of the bright reflecting cumulus.
Lately I’ve been amazed how the same ragged low dark grey clouds during overcast and rain are in fact the same fairly bright fair weather cumulus that I enjoy seeing. It all depends on lighting. (a lot depends on light - not all of course). anyway…
P.S.: I don’t believe that white or grey or black even exist during the daytime. The light that reaches us is blue – even when it looks white. Clouds that look grey are still blue. The curious thing about a cumulus cloud though is that as it grows, the light hitting the top of it shifts higher in hue up towards around 270 or even 300 I would say – again due to light scattering - or lack thereof – why some people insist the sky is purple and others say its blue and others say its blue green and then theres the ‘apparent saturation’ issues caused primarily by haze and high thin clouds.
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Language was a bit short… it was meant as a question. You said #1 can occur in the atmosphere (“Have you never seen that? You don’t understand what’s going on there?”), but would it also look like that from 200m altitude ? Away from street lights ? The first image shows orange on the left, above the horizon it looks great, but further up the orange is everywhere. I wonder what that is. First Idea I had was a smog layer of some kind, or mist… but then I saw that mirrored thing on the right…
So what concerns me about this RL image is the boundary between the orange and the grey blue sky… and the thing I marked with a green circle in above image. Vague, rainbow like trace, with a similar hue. I don’t perceive these affects as atmosphere… there is other light in play.
Away from the sun yes… as it is modeled in MSFS too ? you see it different ?
that could be measured… if it’s actually blue… to claim a color is there, it should show up in the spectrum as a band ! put a spectrometer on it… maybe our brains is fooling us.
But looking up… myself… can’t really connect with it. My eyes see white, gray… it’s just white, or grayish (with the correct RL shadows of course) i wonder if your statement is true for the human perception. The blue will always scatter more, even under the clouds, so maybe you’re right. But can we actually see that ? you can’t look through a massive 20km of cloud… you don’t see the sky behind the cloud… so it would be a subtle effect.
Inherent problem in RGB space.
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Yes, RGB is a pitfall too… especially when talking hue range… it does improve with modern boards and monitors. Inside the simulator (we’re talking about that) they probably use translation from HSL (Hue-Saturation-Lightness)… this coding is much more accurate for light… and it is easier to translate from parameters than RGB. But it eventually lands as RGB, in your GPU ! I’m not an expert in that translation, or if it is the same RGB gradient for every GPU board (?)
Well for one thing, What is sky? As I said before the atmosphere (sky) is varying collections of varieties of particles that are lit in variable ways. That picture shows very dense lower altitude cumulus which are mostly seen as dark blue from this perspective as the sun is being blocked by those dense clouds and we look at the shadow side.
On the upper right half of the picture I wouldn’t declare that I see ‘sky’ as I think you are saying but rather it is cirrus clouds and haze. On the left half of the picture is more and thicker haze and some stratus clouds I believe along with more cirrus and all of that is being lit by sunlight that is NOT being blocked by lower, denser cumulus clouds (that may have a curvature in them for all we know). Down near the horizon on the left you see the affects of denser haze and water vapor backlit by the sun as seen from a distance.
You asked if it would look the same from 200 meters altitude and NO – every change in perspective would require a recalculation of appearance. But I think Asobo has already implemented a weather system based on cubes of atmosphere and so I don’t think it too much of a stretch to use those same cubes for a dumbed down optical implementation. I think they already do this – it could just use improvement which they said they are doing.
There’s nothing wrong on trying to improve things per se.
The problem is what you may have to sacrifice for it, and I don’t think I would vote to prioritize dusk lighting over just about anything related to flight simulation.
Besides, the fact that this topic is even being discussed is proof of how actually awesome it is in the first place.
Tell ya what lads, try an experiment. Every day for a week, find your house in the sim and take a pic of the sunset, do the same out of your window and post both. Live weather, obvs.
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Maybe Q8Pilot’s a flat-earther if he thinks its strange?
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We’ll see… I kinda like what we have now in MSFS, only recently I really dived into it. But all improvements are welcome of course… proposals too… to start with: the more weather sliders to play with, the more fun !
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You started the Sunset topic… maybe just do a proposal in the topic ? You’re the opener… I may join in…
I’ve always found it super impressive how well the earths shadow is depicted in this sim!
And regarding sunset variety and style, I think has been touched on in this thread I think the magnitude of particle simulation and data (that is probably limited?) required to truly represent the variety of sunsets we experience in the real world I imagine is a whole other simulation in itself! If this could be pulled off that would be quite the achievement!
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