I had a thought about what the engine would look like if lighting was slightly exaggerated. Here we see potent sunbeams hitting clouds that very strongly darken the landscape. This contrast creates natural points of emphasis, and it would be fascinating to see what a procedural engine could do naturally with this kind of contrast used. It would be cool flying around a planet and having brilliant contrasts created by the clouds on a regular basis.
Just a thought. The effect could be very mildly exaggerated as to not subtract from the realism aspect.
As a side note, I would just love to fly the Helion around in the scene of this Bierstadt painting.
The lighting isn’t exaggerated in that painting …
I’ve seen such thing in real life.
[Evening/Morning in a very high up mountain valley when the sun just clips the mountain, those thick clouds rolling up the mountain are rare but they do happen. Also probably would already be raining back there in the distance.]
Contrast like that is rare, and I don’t think OP suggested that such lighting doesn’t happen in real life. Considering it’s Bierstadt, it was exaggerated.
The shadow in the front indicates that there’s a mountain blocking most of the sunlight that is coming in either from the left or the right. The strong yellow tone of the sunlit landscape indicates that the sunlight must come from a pretty steep angle trough the atmosphere. The brightness of the sky isn’t really that indicative of how much light really gets into a mountain valley. There are some places where I live that the sun never touches during the winter months.
The situation in the painting is rare but it can happen. I’m saying that it’s already a very low light environment, I think that that beam of light is very locally confined and doesn’t even hit most of the cloud, meaning that the cloud doesn’t need to be very thick to darken the underlying terrain in such a manner.
If that painter does that often, then I guess it probably is.
Yes, I too would like to see such situations, and I think it might already be possible. The HDR in the I-Novae engine looks really good. The shadows and [nonexistant] clouds are still lacking though.
I think to achieve such effect, the HDR “range” we were discussing in the “Camera vs Eye” discussion would just need to be tuned more towards “Camera” where that bright streak of light would make the “exposure” go down and in turn darken the area below the clouds.
Also, Oil Painting Visual mod for Battlescape? Anyone?
Team Fortress and the new Unreal Tournament allow for silly hats, so I don’t see why one wouldn’t have a silly hat server on Battlescape. It would just be even sillier, because the hats will be on spaceships.
