Moon is being erased when changing preset

[K.Wagrez]

Hello everyone,

We are currently testing approaches to improve our day/night cycle, and we are testing swapping environment presets to do so. With a few tweaks to camera exposure and render presets, I can obtain some relatively satisfying night ambient sky (I mean, it's an improvement compared to what we had, I'm stil unhappy).

We use our preset2 during the night, and I realized that the moon just... fades.

With preset0. It is actually already faded, not sure why. It's not as faded while high in the sky, but that's still unrealistic:



With preset2 (our night preset). Apart from some obvious artifacts, the clear problem is that the moon is just missing:




Here is the render_settings (which is originally a copy of a new project's ultra settings) I'm playing with.

environment_preset_test.render

My question is: how do I keep having my moon visible while using this "night" preset ?

Am I using it wrong ? Do you have any sample that present a night environment ? Or how to use Unigine to render a convincing night ?

[silent]

Hi Kevin,

In some our projects we use a simplified approach to day-night cycle and moving sun and moon via tracker (not using any Environment presets except the #1). In attachment you can find such an example. You need to load sun_rotation.track in tracker in order to see it.

Please keep in mind that rotation numbers are pure fiction, so the moon position can be quite strange there 🙂

Also the moon lightning intensity and visible moon billboard intensity are two separate parameters, so if you don't see the moon billboard increase it's scale in Windows -> Settings -> Render -> Environment -> Celestial Bodies -> Moon Intensity:

There can be quite extreme numbers, depending on the exact value being set in the light node.

Thank you!

day-night-simple.upackage

[K.Wagrez]

Yes well we had that before, however we could not obtain a satisfying ambient lighting for the night, it was too dark, unrealistic.

We believed your preset system was made to do that kind of things, and we used the preset2 as a way to have a better lighting during the night, especially in urban scenario where the city "pollutes" the sky with the city lights.

With preset0:

 

With preset2:



I suppose the change from both presets is not just a story of parameters, but the textures used by the presets.

We rather keep preset2 without a moon, than changing it back to preset0.

[silent]

In order to get back moon to the preset2 you need to replace Light Color texture:

By default it's black (meaning no light emits). If you just copy the texture from Preset 0 to Preset 2 you will get the moon billboard to draw again:

Thanks!