P3D HDR Brightness Mod - Bright Daytime and Dark Night

[Fi5kuS 57]

Hmm.. my clouds are much darker (but not invisible) than yours. What texture are you using?

 

On my monitor, everything in your screenshot looks really bright, including the terrain. I only made what looks good on my monitor so you'll have to experiment and find a setting that works best on your setup. :huh:

 

 

Actually using HDE v2 textures. REX Soft Clouds for lower clouds.

[Flic1 972]

 

 

Again it is important to understand how these settings will effect one another so you can troubleshoot them properly. If you are seeing shimmering due to excessive bloom you want to mess with the bloom parameters and not tweak #4. Raising blursigma and bloomthreshold, and lowering bloommagnitude will diminish excessive bloom. Tweak #4 is for increasing daytime brightness, not bloom. Lower the multiplier in small increments until you are happy with the general brightness of sunlit terrain and your instrument panel. As for tweak #5, the closer you get to one the more dramatic your daytime darks and daytime brights will be. You may find your flight deck is too dark when looking out the window even though it looked great when you were below that overcast layer. Or your overhead panel will over saturate with brightness as you move your head position away from the outside windows. If you experience this you need to lower the multiplier in tweak number 5. Thanks for reading and good luck!

 

Mike, thanks for these tweaks!  I have the night sky looking pretty good (almost like it does in FSX w/DX10) and I'm happy that the stars are much dimmer.  The only issue I am noticing is that something has darkened my night textures a bit too much (using default P3D textures). I messed with the 'avgluminance' but have not been able to brighten them back up.  I'm just wondering of you know which setting would effect that.  I know there will be a tradeoff somewhere else if the night textures are increased but wanted to mess with it a little....thanks!

 

Eric

[Pilot53 543]

Mike, thanks for these tweaks!  I have the night sky looking pretty good (almost like it does in FSX w/DX10) and I'm happy that the stars are much dimmer.  The only issue I am noticing is that something has darkened my night textures a bit too much (using default P3D textures). I messed with the 'avgluminance' but have not been able to brighten them back up.  I'm just wondering of you know which setting would effect that.  I know there will be a tradeoff somewhere else if the night textures are increased but wanted to mess with it a little....thanks!

 

Eric

Yeah thats the effect of the night darkening, anything not illuminated will appear pitch black.  Personally I think its more realistic that way in general.  I don't think there is a way to make the textures brighter using hdr, as hdr effects lit objects.  I also notice that in some cases the orbx urban night textures are too dark, or only come into view at low altitude, wish there was a way around that but I think that's up to orbx.  But to answer your question, lowering avg luminance will increase brightness at night.

[fly_edds 26]

Many thanks for your efforts in developing this fantastic tweak, Mike!

 

Everything was fine, but after applying step 4, 5 and 6 my screen went entirely black, even at day. Maybe Reshade interferes?

I'm investigating...

 

EDIT: Okay, the conflicting line is float luminance =  ( 0.50 * CalcLuminance( color ));

Any idea why this is happening?

[willywonka 36]

Not familiar with HSHL coding...

The file is pretty much C#, you just gotta find the correct constant to change. Mike gave the description of what each does in post #1.

[DarkstarF16 72]

Many thanks for your efforts in developing this fantastic tweak, Mike!

 

Everything was fine, but after applying step 4, 5 and 6 my screen went entirely black, even at day. Maybe Reshade interferes?

I'm investigating...

 

EDIT: Okay, the conflicting line is float luminance = ( 0.50 * CalcLuminance( color )); luminance = ( 0.50 * CalcLuminance( color ));[/b]

Any idea why this is happening?

Try adding an 'f' so the line looks like: float luminance = ( 0.50f * CalcLuminance( color ));

[fly_edds 26]

Thanks Brian, it's not the missing "f" and it's also not Reshade.

I will download the file from bitbucket, maybe I made a typing error.

Edit: Finally it's working!

[DarkstarF16 72]

[molleh 451]

I have an issue with the tweaks. There seems to be a problem with the on-the-fly adjustment of brightness (the part that's supposed to simulate our eyes adjusting to brighter or darker environments.) The tweak was supposed to adjust it to be much faster, but I'm finding that it doesn't change at all. When I load into the sim it'll be dark or mildly dark, and if I change date and time it will adjust to that (e.g. if I set it to midnight it will up the brightness in response to the night time scene.) But then if I change back to daytime/mid-day, the brightness is still high (higher than it should be for daytime, with a ton of bloom.) Where it should be increasing brightness (such as when peering down into a very dark cockpit, like the A2A Piper) it isn't.

 

I am going to go line by line and see where the problem lies. BTW this happened when I did the tweaks manually, and with the two tweaked builds from willywonka's (kindly provided) bitbucket. (yes, compiled shaders were deleted before starting P3D each time))

[Pilot53 543]

I have an issue with the tweaks. There seems to be a problem with the on-the-fly adjustment of brightness (the part that's supposed to simulate our eyes adjusting to brighter or darker environments.) The tweak was supposed to adjust it to be much faster, but I'm finding that it doesn't change at all. When I load into the sim it'll be dark or mildly dark, and if I change date and time it will adjust to that (e.g. if I set it to midnight it will up the brightness in response to the night time scene.) But then if I change back to daytime/mid-day, the brightness is still high (higher than it should be for daytime, with a ton of bloom.) Where it should be increasing brightness (such as when peering down into a very dark cockpit, like the A2A Piper) it isn't.

 

I am going to go line by line and see where the problem lies. BTW this happened when I did the tweaks manually, and with the two tweaked builds from willywonka's (kindly provided) bitbucket. (yes, compiled shaders were deleted before starting P3D each time))

To reduce the transition time you will need to raise the time delta value, and to reduce the effect you will need to lower the multiplier in tweak #5.  Also what you are describing happens to me as well and is normal since you are going from extreme darkness to the brightest part of the day.  If i try this on my machine it takes about 20 sec and some view panning for everything to return to normal.  Just think about what happens if you move from a very dark room into the bright outdoors.

[molleh 451]

The point of the tweak though is to make the transition almost instant. It's not supposed to take minutes.

[Pilot53 543]

The point of the tweak though is to make the transition almost instant. It's not supposed to take minutes.

Yes, almost instant under normal flying circumstances, like looking from outside the windscreen to the overhead panel and back, not going from pitch darkness at 2400 to 1200 and bright sunshine instantly.  But if you are not happy with the adjustment time just increase the time delta value.

[molleh 451]

Thanks, I am tweaking some stuff now. I think there might be a small glitch with the HDR when it just compiles the shaders from scratch (after deleting them), it doesn't have to do with the actual settings in the hlsl file, but it goes away after re-loading into the sim a second time.

[Balint Szarka 123]

Hi everyone. I have just started experimenting with tweaking HDR.hlsl. I'd like to get proper dark nights but without compromising the default daylight. Is this somehow possible? In FSX I was using SweetFX but I don't know if that would crash P3D. Probably it would...

 

I changed avgLuminance to 4.40f. I know it's pretty much overkill. But my new monitor is too bright even though I have the brightness turned down to 10%, only. What I noticed is changing avgLuminance, did change the daylight. Is there any way to bring it back up to the default level without giving up 4.40f of avgLuminance? 

 

Another question is, could anybody explain it to me on noob level what does BaseColor *= lerp( .35f, 1.0f, fAlpha ) do in GPUTerrain.fx file? I know it is explained in the first post, but that is to high for me... I'd like to make day- and night-lighting as perfect as I had it with SweetFX in FSX. I still have my SweetFX settings saved just in case that could help to set HDR up in Prepar3D.

[autogyro 18]

If you're using a high avgLuminance (like I am, using 3.0f):

 

To increase overall brightness without really affecting the night, try also using line 164,

 

    float3 brighten = x * saturate( color * luminance * avgLuminance );

 

Where x is basically whatever scalar you want, I personally use 4, along with 0.1 for line 90 (    float luminance =  ( 0.1 * CalcLuminance( color )); )

 

This gives me pretty reasonable dark nights and bright days.