night lighting

[av8r13 15]

hello all,

 

i am very happy with my v4 with orbx day scenery. however, the night lighting leaves a lot to be desired. basically just a few white lights for freeways close in to the aircraft.

FS9 night scenery with UT was far superior.

any ideas how i can improve the night lighting in V4 with all the ORBX sceneries?

[ErichB 3,636]

Which Orbx packages are you using?  To get a good representation of ground night lighting you will need either FTX Vector (which will flesh out the road network) or a full Orbx regional scenery.  I would also recommend, after installing those, to use the Orbx Lights Config

[n99wb 10]

One simmer had recommended HDR off for more night time realism.

I tried it and could see his point, but his suggestion was not ORBX related.

 

N99WB

[CFIJose 5,485]

12 hours ago, av8r13 said:

hello all,

 

i am very happy with my v4 with orbx day scenery. however, the night lighting leaves a lot to be desired. basically just a few white lights for freeways close in to the aircraft.

FS9 night scenery with UT was far superior.

any ideas how i can improve the night lighting in V4 with all the ORBX sceneries?

The two FTX addons that I use are FTXG & LC and IMO the night lighting rivals XPlane 11.

With URP: (removed link) installed, p3d v4 is a completely different sim at night IMO.

You will deal with some shimmers, but the visuals are worth it.

[Chock 17,769]

One of the things I've done which makes the night environment better, is to edit the actual texture for the night lights. I did that with the night light texture for Ultimate Terrain 2 Europe simply by opening up the PX_LIGHT_LM texture and making the radius of the light's texture a bit bigger, because I thought that by default the ground lights looked a bit weedy.

It was a big improvement and was easily accomplished with the free paint program paint.net, so you don't need anything fancy to try it. If you do something like that though, make sure you save a back up of any texture file you plan to mess about with so you can put things back how they were if you don't like what it does.

[vgbaron 3,482]

The posts that were directly related to Black Marble were moved to the Night Environment support forum.

 

Vic

[Cruachan 705]

53 minutes ago, vgbaron said:

The posts that were directly related to Black Marble were moved to the Night Environment support forum.

 

Vic

Yes, light the afterburner and head off to the NE/Black Marble forum if you are really serious about wishing to transform your Night Flights 😉

Also, word to the wise. For up to date info you should visit the Developer's forums. Some great info there, including optimisations for performance and how to avoid conflicts and incompatibilities with other 3rd Party products.

Mike

[Flic1 969]

16 hours ago, av8r13 said:

hello all,

 

i am very happy with my v4 with orbx day scenery. however, the night lighting leaves a lot to be desired. basically just a few white lights for freeways close in to the aircraft.

FS9 night scenery with UT was far superior.

any ideas how i can improve the night lighting in V4 with all the ORBX sceneries?

This is how my night looks with FTX Global, FTX Vector and OpenLC NA:

https://www.dropbox.com/sh/vjdzqq6wiso5ont/AABMLOPlRS2Un8s_rhT66U6Pa?dl=0

If you don't already have it, I would recommend the PTA tool as it has settings for night lighting that help tremendously.  HDR settings and monitor settings will also have to be set to your liking.  My monitor was using a 'Gaming' setting and I had not even realized it.  Things got better when I switched it to 'Standard'.  I then made adjustments with my HDR and PTA tool to get the contrast and brightness to my liking.

[Zimmerbz 153]

Is this something easy to run or does it require going in and manually changing things with in the cfg's?  I'm notorious for messing things up so I try to get things with installers or easy to run executable files.  I'd hate to spend  the money for Base and Vector and not have it work with all of the Orbx I have or mess things up and cause me to do a complete re install of p3d.

[av8r13 15]

something is definitely wrong with my night time.

i have all the ORBX add ons and it looks nothing like what Flic1 has above.

let me try and take a snap shot

[Iceman2 110]

Orbx reduces the brightness of night textures and leaves the autogen lights. Great for low flyers but when you fly high and the autogen disappears there will be very faint night textures only. (too dim to see) I didn't mind the P3D default night textures. Unfortunately the default day textures are not as good as Orbx. Sadly we're not allowed to have both together.

The fix although not perfect is to use the PTA tool and boost the luminance of the night textures.

Its a personal taste as to how bright you want it, but now I have nice city lights way off in the distance when flying tube liners. I also use black marble to show nice roads lights. Only catch with the PTA adjustment is that when landing or flying at low level the brightened night textures along with the autogen building lights and highway street lights get just a bit bright.

Some minor adjustments is required to find a likeable balance.

IM