I think you must have misunderstood these developers - perhaps they were talking about exaggerated blue shadows in some games. The fact is - shadows can have many colors in reality, depending on environment. Blue is most common - caused by sky light. Our vision partially adapts, so we don't notice it so much. If game engine doesn't take it into account then it can end up with shadow colors that will seem exaggerated. Read this: LINK. It doesn't explain the full theory of light, but it's an interesting read for those of you, who are not graphics programmers If you actually had such technical abilities, then yes - you would not need software doing HDR for you But you would also need very high FOV. This is what kinda protects us from accidentally looking at the Sun I would not dare to play a game with such device, having limited FOV. I would be too affraid for my eyes to even enjoy the game
The developer already answered saying that you are wrong when you say that ambient light in the game is gray: http://isiforums.net/f/showthread.php/9422-rFactor-2-s-look?p=127346&viewfull=1#post127346 And the developer also already explained why this "The fact is - shadows can have many colors in reality, depending on environment. Blue is most common - caused by sky light." is not true: http://isiforums.net/f/showthread.php/9422-rFactor-2-s-look?p=127596&viewfull=1#post127596 And this is why the shadows are blue in many images and videos and in AAA games like Dragon Age Inquisition and Metal Gear Solid Ground Zeroes: http://digital-photography-school.com/why-is-the-snow-in-my-pictures-so-blue/
There is no "wrong" or "right" in this story just different opinions and "visions". The science of the light is just only one, but games are using BIG shortcuts to make things looking "realistic" as much as possible without rendering 1 frame per day to implement maxwell... Also there is still who's expecting more the eye vision, others wishing for a sort of sensor look, like a reflex cam or a TV...etc. Just take 10 different engines who are all judged as realistic by the masses; this would mean they all looks the same, or very similar, since we have just 1 reality in this world...but you'll be amazed by the difference between all of them...because there is people judging "realistic" something they are used to see in a Hollywood movie, or a GettyImage picture, or a Istangram...or just because the Bias tell your brain it looks realistic because you like a lot how it looks... Pity the real life enviro (the one you see every single day with your own eyes) is much more boring...and this is why you don't need just a camera to be a great photographer (still, photos are not a raw output of the real life no)... BTW, what's KS is suggesting is in theory right if we were playing into a GI enviro or similar, where that dominant is affected by indirect lighting, so the blue will be mixed with other tones bouncing back from surfaces an materials affected by the direct illumination. That means a yellow wall should bounce back his color (in relationship with the material physics, the coat, the surface roughness etc etc etc) to his own shadows above the tarmac...and it will react to that blue dominant in a different way, then that surface where you have that shadow will do the same..etc etc. Just unlocking ambient color it's just making all surface in shadows totally passive to that color. So, if it is true (and it is) the ambient color shouldn't be monochrome, it is also true the real life light it's WAY more complex because the inter-ref which is not calculated, so it is just like using a blue filter on top of everything. Also, the problem when unlocking ambient color to NOT be monochrome, is that color is coming straight from the sky and nothing else, making everything bluish and flat. Mores road for example, which is reddish IRL due the nature of the tarmac moisture, will looks bluish.... As for that pink wall, still at Mores, will look bluish in shadows as well. This is way overdone in my opinion and would kill a track atmosphere, making everything and everywhere looking extremely cold and lifeless.. and very similar in terms of character. So this is kinda domino effect, where you add a realistic feature of the light, but then missing the goal of making things looking more realistic, due the fact the game engine is missing that part where materials and surfaces are reacting to the light introducing MUCH more elements and colors in the scene. Everything in real life is bouncing, scattering and contaminating each other. Going monochrome it is also a shortcut, that's for sure, but I can recognize the Silverstone character, or the Mores one, due the materials and colors involved in the scene...instead getting both places looking the same due a big dominant on top of all materials (unique feature). An example of correct calibration and balancing in my opinion (mores tarmac), while the third sample should be similar to what you get unlocking the ambient color. Just take the painted line as a reference, and they are of course white; View attachment 15930
Thanks for your reply, Tuttle. Just to underline something here: I'm not saying you should go for much more blue ambient light. Just not lock it completely to grey (white ). This is why I underlined sunsets where world can really be dominated by blue light. Of course we cannot give shadows correct colors everywhere if we don't have GI. But I don't agree that we should aim for showing the user original appearance of surface, unmodified by light. For me that's against the very purpose of having lighting engine in a game If you're aiming for 100% neutral light, you're sucking life from your lighting. You have to take away some of it (as our eyes will not adapt to displayed images the same way they adapt to real world), but not all of it. Of course it's just my opinion, but perhaps it will add to yours and make you reconsider some things. I've underlined sunsets in my first post for this reason. Every day I walk home from work I walk through a bit of blue world past sunset. You can tone it down for many reasons, I understand that. But I don't want it removed completely - it makes me miss something obvious when looking at it. Interesting thing is that in the picture you've posted, last image (the correct one) has some yellowish shift in sunlight and some blueish in shadow. That is in fact what I'm expecting from rF2 But when I take screenshot from rF2 in the evening I get slightly yellowish tarmac in sunlight and grey tarmac in shadow (I took a screenshot, blurred it and took multiple samples). Perhaps your updated lighting will be more like the correct image you've just posted - I hope so Cheers.
So KS is right when he says ambient light in rFactor 2 is gray? And he is also right when he says that shadows can be a little bluish due to the sky? I'm not being sarcastic. I really want to know because your old posts said - or I understood it wrong - these two thing were not true and searching about the second subject on the web I also read confirmation that it was in fact not correct - even taking into consideration the phenomena that do add some blue to the image and - making possible the dream of real time ground truth GI approximation http://isiforums.net/f/showthread.php/9422-rFactor-2-s-look?p=127596&viewfull=1#post127596 http://digital-photography-school.com/why-is-the-snow-in-my-pictures-so-blue/
I swear by my mother soul that I cant see any blueish in the last shot. I'm not being sarcastic or trying to challenge you. Is it my cheap display calibration? The only way to make it bluish is by selecting "cold" in the display. And to the naked eye I've never seen it either. I've read that some people, especially with age, cannot see blue very well.
Wheres the skylight in the shots? off topic: the dress itself is blue http://www.wired.com/2015/02/science-one-agrees-color-dress/
That is true, and not to forget everything involved, such as the hardware calibration and physical ability of the individuals looking at the image.
Yeah. I like the way Metal Gear Solid Ground Zeroes look. But Kojima makes it clear that is not correctness the goal. Its artistic beauty. "Photo-realism through the eyes of a fox". http://www.gdcvault.com/play/1018086/Photorealism-Through-the-Eyes-of Hideo is a film-maker and manipulates the image the same way a photographer can choose to have incorrect blue shadows cast by the sky (not influenced by other bounced lights). Artistic vision. Edit: "incorrect blue shadows from the sky" I'm still not sure. Because older posts say they are due to incorrect camera settings and other things. And photographers say they are also incorrect. And wikipedia about rayleigh scattering also say they are not visible by human vision. But KS say they are visible But if "there is not 'right' or 'wrong'" in every case, they can be correct from a natural standpoint and not only by an artistic choice.
Here are the rgb values for a blurred (average) area of the shadow. Blue is always the dominant color. The tarmac detail texture itself has a blue average. In my opinion the most problematic areas are the "greyscale" textures (road and concrete stuff, textures with similar/equal values for all 3 rgb channels) because they are very sensitive to changes in the color of the lighting and hdr multiplies this effect. There are some pretty strange examples with red and green blotches in the tarmac texture of some older tracks. When I create a new road texture the final step is always to convert it into greyscale (to remove every hint of color), back to rgb and colorbalancing the texture slightly into blue/green. Blue is the dominant color of the ambient light. There may be some special conditions at dusk/dawn, when the haze and clouds are illuminated by red (scattered) sunlight, but that's the exception. The question is, should we put the blueish tone in the texture, the material settings (Ambient RGB) or the "light source" for ambient light?
I have no clue if there is a way to balance the image more natural correct, but even if i think it is really hard to convience everybody.
The "light source" for ambient light would be the one cited here: "make ambient blue"? http://isiforums.net/f/showthread.php/9422-rFactor-2-s-look?p=127346&viewfull=1#post127346 That is clearly the choice, for example, in MGSGZ that Ive seen by playing the game: blue in tarmac, constructions, rocks, etc. Oh, and so the shot was bluish and my monitor and/or my vision is not capable of displaying/seeing it.
And searching more, the abstract of this paper clearly says that some people can see blue shadows and show the reason why most people cannot. http://www.opticsinfobase.org/ao/abstract.cfm?uri=ao-33-21-4719 "The apparent blueness of outdoor shadows has two main causes: the illumination of the shadows by blue skylight and the enhancement of the perception of blue by simultaneous color contrast. Other physiological mechanisms, such as brightness contrast and afterimages, can also affect the perception of a shadow's blueness. Preferential scattering by the cornea does not seem to make a major contribution. Despite these effects, color constancy causes most people to observe an empirically blue shadow as colorless."
Always in the light source since we're talking about color of incoming light. Unless of course material itself has such color, then you set it in material's albedo and then additionally you get it lit by slightly blue ambient light. Texture defines albedo of material. Diffuse and ambient colors are multipliers to further define this albedo. Since both directional and ambient define the same physical reaction of material, only used by different fragment of lighting equation, they should have the same value.
Using gimp to see if the shades are bluish... Bluish shades in every F1 photo from the tests in Spain. Official F1 site or major news sites. The only places with no bluish shades are the sites about professional photography. Pretty sure now the shades are bluish and ambient should be blue just as you said in the old posts. Never going to look at the tracks the same way again
Because the reference... which is the white, not the blue. This doesn't means there is no blue in a balanced picture, you are just making, what you know it is white in the scene (REFERENCE), looking white and then getting everything else as a consequence of that reference.
Problem is, using a bluish light - taking his color straight from the skymap (without interacting with materials), is not going to generate that last output; it will add that blue even in the right side of the picture, which is going to look gray instead reddish. A good compromise would be just making the shadow looking less neutral, without affecting the entire scene. This is also an example of a possible output adding a very subtle bluish ambient on top of the mores example. I don't see anymore what I saw IRL (and again, we should find a reference to discuss this things...our eyes or a camera sensor, a WB calibrated shot or whatever...), the road under full sun now looks gray, while the left side under shadow looks to much blue. It's a very tricky goal to reach, especially in a game engine without any GI playing a role. View attachment 15941 I remember being astonished when arrived to the track. That warm color was everywhere, bouncing back from that big pink grandstand, walls, those red rock embankment...and this reddish tarmac. So it's all a matter of compromise in a NO GI enviro; balancing and calibrating for direct sun, or for shadows. First will make the scene more similar with the real counterpart in the same condition, while the second will looks better into shadows (making both looking 100% correct would need GI). In real life these changes are part of the physics of the light (interaction/spectrums), in the game engine you need to force one of the two, adding a dominance (no interaction/no spectrum).
After reading this maybe some one can try this interactive stuff http://threejs.org/examples/#webgl_shaders_sky
Here we go; that's the new output we're working on with new automation, a bit of code change, changes on TM and no more cockpit overexposure. Just unlocked the ambient light to be NO-Monochrome to make few tests. These are two samples on VERY different location on the planet. Both are at around local noon, where the sun is playing a STRONG role in the scene. I don't want to give you a personal opinion on what you see here, I'm just curious to know what do you guys think of a possible implementation of the unlocked ambient (this is not a poll, just to talk about something more than random pictures)... Mores: View attachment 15947 Malaysia: View attachment 15949
