please have mercy on the aircraft skinners

[Citabria]

repost from general discussion just hoping this reaches the right people.

I would like to convey my point of view as best I can on the new terrain so...

heres me trying not to flip out and conveying my consternation at drastic terrain changes in the latest version that have left the majority of player made skins in the game looking way to light and washed out.

This is not a matter of monitor brightness or contrast.  It is a matter if interaction between existing plane artwork and the new terrain which is visible regardless of individual monitor discrepancies.  therefore can be controlled only at the source: the aircraft and terrain tile textures themselves.

looking on the bright side at least I made a few p40e's to the origional AH2 dark tile brightness and contrast and they look ok. however if this terrain persists as the new standard I will have to redo every skin I have submitted because the contrast and sifference between the skins and the terrain is to much for me to tolerate if this is indeed the prefered threshold for the arena's contrast color saturation and brightness.

waffle said it himself its all relative. the skins need to be calibrated to a standard background which thus far has been the old arena tile textures themselves.
this new terrain is well detailed and well made but it is of a different style that is nostalgic of warbirds 2.0. the chaos of realism is removed and there is now order and conformity in the textures. (I love the 3d modeling my only beef is with the textures and brightness and color saturation and contrast)

I just don't know what to strive for now. I have been going so hard striving for realism  with a bit of saving private ryan band of brothers coloring flare to the skins I have made recently but now I am just lost

I don't even know what looks good any more. now everything looks too washed out or to saturated.

the green is so green that it overpoweres everything and the dark is so dark well i dunno

please help I need sleep.


the terrain could be altered to match the brightness color and contrast threshold of the previous versions textures. if this could be done I would be thrilled with the new terrain

new version... the once shadowy and dark cockpits look pretty bright thought they are unchanged.


old version... with the bright terrain of AH2 that had been revised several times form the origional darknes that plagued it.



old version... the sun is shining bright on the wing of this p51 and on the ground below


new version...  the ground is dark the wing of this p51 still glows creating an unrealistic discrepancy


new version.... its just sitting there cut and pasted the plane is not part of the environment it dosnt fit


old version... its there flying in the air you can see its part of the scene the sun is shining on the plane and on the land and sky behind it. all together it pull sitself off as one complete picture


all I want is the old texture threshold for color and brightness and contrast back.

it could remain the two toned green for a long time as long as its a two toned green that is of the same brightness and color saturation as the previous terrain tile textures which had been tweaked so well.

does anyone remember ah2 beta? do we really have to go through all this suffering again when the reference settings for acceptable color saturation and brightness and contrast have already been established by the textures from the previous version?

changing whats in the textures and changing the 3d models is welcomed always but  the already established standards for COLOR SATURATION, BRIGHTNESS and CONTRAST have already been established and must be followed for the sanity players making skins and to establish consistency in the interaction between the skins and the terrain itself.

[rogerdee]

nicely worded post

I agree the terrain doesn't look right how it is,it is just too dark and all depth perception down low is lost.

Also its not just in the air its on the ground too aftection gvs as well

[Krusty]

It's not just the aircraft... The terrain was dark, there was a haze on the horizon, and all of a sudden this super bright, crystal-sharp moon comes into the sky. It looks like it's 50 feet off my wing, instead of behind the hazy mountains.

I agree very much that the terrain change was not the best choice for HTC.

By that I mean I'm all for change, but something's wrong, be it light levels, a bug with light hitting the ground, or with just plain old brightness of the ground.

[TDeacon]

Agree with Fester.  This new terrain lightness/contrast discrepancy is now the first thing one sees, and I think it needs to be adjusted to be more like it was in the previous version.

[Dux]

"Waffle said it himself its all relative. the skins need to be calibrated to a standard background which thus far has been the old arena tile textures themselves."

Are you suggesting that the colors on the airplanes should somehow be changed to match the terrain colors?

Seriously? There's no way Waffle could have said this.

What about FS Standards? RLM standards? Colors are what they are... so much of this color, so much of that color... a very precisely defined mixture (most of the time) calculated to result in a very specific color.

It's not relative at all. RAF Dark Earth should be the same color whether it's over grass, over snow, over water, or over the moon. The color is what it is, it is NOT relative to any terrain.

Camouflage colors are what they are because of tons of research and experimentation, and they are mostly well documented as to what they look like.

The terrain colors are off... period. It is folly to adjust all of the established airplane colors to match some fictitious terrain. They'll fix the terrain... it will be correct soon enough, and then all of our skins will look correct in comparison.

Don't redo any skins, they are fine... it's not what is broken. Just give it time.

[RSLQK186]

TY Dux

I am most please to read that it is not my computer but the terrain that need fixing. Had to buy a new one when AH2 came out and did a hefty upgrade when the new(now old) trees came along.

Would prefer to wait till vista is stable(?) before going any further.

[Waffle]

I said that moons ago, when the old terrain was in place, basically it was to the point of keeping hues/saturation consistent in our "game world". It's like building a model....if you painted the actual shade of rlmXX on a model plane, it would look dark... you'd have to lighten it some to have it look correct in / on a small scale environment.
There's going to be some growing pains, as now the basis of the "game world" has changed.

with that being said - I wouldn't rush out and change any skins yet, as there will probably be small changes over the next several releases.

[Dux]

"It's like building a model....if you painted the actual shade of rlmXX on a model plane, it would look dark... you'd have to lighten it some to have it look correct in / on a small scale environment."

Waffle, I understand the philosophy behind that, as I used to do much plastic modeling. The problem is that plastic modeling and 3-D modeling are not the same animal.

To explain... a plastic model is viewed in the real world, by standing a few feet away, and looking at it with your eyes. However, the scale of the model (i.e., smaller) makes it look as if it were a full-size model, but much further away.

The reason for lightening the model paints stems from 2 things. One is called atmospheric perspective; it simulates having more particles of atmoshphere in between you and the model. Since in real-life you are only 1 foot away from the model, you whiten the colors to make it appear to be further away. It's a simple trick that artists have used for centuries, find any well-done landscape painting from any period and you will see atmospheric perspective being used.

The second reason for lightening model paints is that in a real-life full-scale airplane, there is more surface area to diffuse and scatter the available light. It looks brighter because there is much more diffuse light being bounced into your eyes. Also, large surface areas like wings will bounce a large amount of light back up onto the side of the fuselage, making it appear brighter. This does not happen (to the same degree) on a plastic model.

These painting tricks work on real-life plastic models because we inhabit the same environment as the model... we share the same lighting, the same atmosphere.

That is NOT the case with a 3-D model. A 3-d model lives in a virtual environment, a virtual environment that may or (as the case here may be) not accurately represent the real-world.

If the colors on the 3-d model don't look correct in your virtual environment, and you know that your colors are correct because you matched them to official reference sources, then the conclusion must be that the virtual environment is not fully correct.

Sure, your monitor may be a foot away, but the scene viewed within is completely contained within that virtual environment. The 3-D airplane does not appear to be 90 feet away... IT IS 90 feet away (from the virtual camera point).

Is the virtual environment scattering diffuse light properly? Are there proper amounts of ambient light? Only when your environment is correct can you ever hope for the colors to look correct. If the fog settings are correct, it will simulate the effect of lightening the colors, and atmospheric perspective, without having to mess with the color mixtures.

So if the environment is correct, everything else will fall into place. Waffle, please see my post in the Terrain Team's forum and we can discuss further.


[edit: Actually, there is a third reason for lightening model paints... to simulate the effect of weathering, UV fading, and oxidation that begins the very moment the airplane meets the outside world. All colors are fugitive, some more than others. This IS a valid strategy in painting 3-D models.]

[Citabria]

waffle are you still boostin up the gamma in game? or do you use 1.0 gamma now?

I think it could be  problematic not using 1.0 gamma at the source when creating the art and viewing it in game

 if not it might be causing a lot of the artistic headaches and more importantly eyestrain and difficulty flying and driving some of us are experiencing now.

[Krusty]

Even *IF* the colors were absolute and final, which I doubt they are, there's something wrong with the way LIGHT hits those colors, whatever HTC may choose to put in place.

There are NO highlights or shadows on any part of the ground now. You cannot see a hill 10 feet under you against the ground 100 feet below that. You can't even see the fershlugginer map room when you're rolling toward it. It took me 3 minutes in an LVT at an undefended port to figure out where the hell the map room was! I was 100 feet from it the entire time!

Regardless of WHAT colors are used, something is WRONG with the way the light is hitting those colors now.


IMO the colors are too dark, but I could "live" with them if the freaking light were hitting the terrain the same way it hits buildings, objects, and aircraft.

[Citabria]

they might have altered the  materials file but from what Ive seen in the
training arena it looks like the textures are so dark they eliminate any hint
 of shading
these pics and any other pic you see me posting of the game is with the
 game gamma set to 1.0 gamma and standard vid card settings...

again seeing this its possible the material shading and reflectivity files
have been altered but most likely its just the textures.

[Citabria]

if the new textures could be brightened enough to match the old textures visible in this pic I think eveyrone would walk away smiling.

[Dux]

Cit, if we were able to export those tiles from the TE... which we can't until they release the new version... we'd see that the colors are the same as the old tiles. Krusty is right... it's the way that the light is bouncing off the tiles that is making it look dark, the diffuse properties of the tile materials are wrong. When that is fixed, the colors will appear right.

Just make sure that we're talking about the same "dark" here.... one kind of dark is because the color itself has too much black in it; the other kind of dark is because the light hitting it is inadequate.

The problem we are seeing here is the second one, and it's not something that is fixed by Gamma. That would be like posting a badly adjusted photograph, and telling everyone else to adjust their monitors to compensate. No... the right way is to fix the photograph.

Those are interesting pics, Cit... I built the TA, I'm going to double check if those brighter tiles are a custom (one of mine) tile.

[Dux]

Just checked the TA... yup... those lighter tiles are the custom grass tile I made. It's the same texture as the (old) default tile, the only difference is I removed the shrubs and grass from it so the GV students could have an easier time seeing the GV targets at range.

So that one tile is a leftover from pre-2.02, and it uses the old materials setting.

[Citabria]

I hope that is the reason as it would be the easiest to fix but it seems odd that the terrain now has a material file that only affects newly created unreleased terrain tiles but not any other tiles added by terrain makers?

where did you get this information?