this post was submitted on 25 May 2025
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The top right image is at sunrise or sunset, and if the game is going for natural illumination (rather than the so-called "Ambient lighting" which isn't at all realistic) low-light times will look pretty faded and somber because most light will be coming from indirect lighting so amongst other things the colors you will see are affected by the illumination being just light reflected by nearby objects which themselves have color and thus don't reflect the full light spectrum.
The top left image is with the sun high in the sky so most things are being illuminated by direct light. Further it looks like it's relying on the Ambient Lighting trick, which means shadows too will be better illuminated (and hence not realistic) because even though they're not hit by direct light, that ambient light makes everything look like it's getting light by a weaker light that is unaffected by shadows (and also projects no shadows) coming from all around. Oh, and it has the insane amount of bloom that the game originally had (IMHO, it looks better with it switched off) so everything looks extra bright and over-saturated.
I walk my dog every day around sundown. That's way too dark. Maybe if the air is so clean and dry that it doesn't scatter light as much, but that is impossible because lake and forrest.
And it's a game. Lighting should depend on mood more then reality (even in movies they add impossible lights everywhere).
Still nice you understand what they call "PBR".
Edit: maybe higher elevation where the air is thiner? Idk.
A major complaint about modern movies is the prevalence of realistic lighting. Night scenes are getting so dark, you can't see anything. This came up in a recent RLM review where they shared a story about some actor in an unrelated movie asking the director where the lighting was coming from in some night scene. The director said the lighting was coming from the same place as the music. It's more important to convey an idea or feeling then it is to convey realism. For the media illiterate(like CinemaSins), it's easier to complain about unrealism then it is to complain about meaning.
I'm actually making a computer game that takes place in space, within solar systems and is in 3D with a (somewhat) realistic style - a mistaken choice of art style given the time I'm having to spend in 3D modelling even though it's mostly empty space :/
It would be near unusable with realistic lighting, especially further away from the system's sun, because in most places there's just this one decent light source which is the sun and this extremelly weak "lighting" from the background which is mainly black with stars (since it doesn't take place near the center of a galaxy, that background has about the same star density as the night sky on Earth). If I was doing realistic lighting, only near the sun or near planets would it look good, and the latter only on the sunny side of the planet (because of the indirect light from the planet), not the dark side.
So I'm having to fake it using ambient light, otherwise most objects would just be entirelly dark most of the time (it would be that or putting lots of little lights on them, which carries other implications).
Anyways, the point being that most space scenes in Sci-Fi films are also total complete bollocks for similar reasons: almost everything would be pretty much black almost all of the time or at best have very sharp shadows everywhere but near the illuminated side of large stellar objects. (There's actually a scene in Star Wars - Rogue One where they purposefully use realistic illumination for effect and the scene starts with a stary dark background and suddenly a star destroyer starts to emerge from such a total darkness that it was not at all visible, and we see more and more of it come out from the shadow of the Death Star).
In all fairness, in my journey learning game making, lighting turned out to be an unexpectedly interesting subject and actually fun, though it's unusual to have the chance to really use it for effect (well, the rings around the planets in my game do look pretty stunning merely from the interplay of light and shadow as long as I their axis is tilted relative to the direction of the sun).
hahah that's great