• I wanted heavier atmospheric haze/fog. The reasoning for which is two-fold:
  
  
• The general feel of this area is a barren “post-apocalyptic” wasteland. And I don’t mean that in the traditional post-apocalyptic Mad Max sort of way; the world of Steel Hunters wasn’t ever decimated by nuclear war but, rather, the slow depletion of natural resources (unrelated) and the onset of, basically, the worst possible nightmare version of climate change that could be imagined (and is almost certainly scientifically… non-scientific). In short: every environment has a unique feel/setting and the goal of each of these sandboxes is to fully embrace a worst-case scenario of what that environment in the game’s world.
  
  
• More practically, it’s way easier to handle the blend for the unbelievably intense sand storms (literally, they can not be believed because it’s not also, likely, scientifically non-scientific) that can crop up mid-mission — requiring players to adjust their approach entirely.
  
  
• Along that same line of thinking, there is entirely too much blue sky if you catch a glimpse of the sky through the clouds — and just adding more cloud-cover would obscure the actual sun vector all the time (instead of 75–85% now).
  
  
• To adjust this, I have to modify the rayleigh calculation coefficients just enough to reduce the blue of the end result without blowing out the scene’s lighting and composition in the other direction (trump-orange).
  
  
• There is a lovely issue with the volumetrics rendering light blue light shafts if you happen to end up in an along the edge of an occluded area (this is unrelated to the sky color, as I discovered).
  
  
• This gets worse if the directional light is completely obscured, at which point the resulting composition ends up with a light blue screen area where the light would normally be (not super obvious/ugly, but it annoyed me. A lot).
  
  
• I don’t tend to update time-of-day during gameplay, but I still ran into an issue with the volumetrics and sky/cloud/light settings getting out of sync at night (meaning the moon ended up with red/brown-ish volumetrics despite a component white light color) — and time of day can make for a nice demo sometimes (and I may eventually have a very, very subtle progression of time in a mission at some point).
  
  
• The eye adaptation has issues maintaining a consistent exposure level as you go through the map.
  

• The Plus Side of This: I don’t have to jump back and forth between all sorts of entities to tweak properties.
  
  
• The Down Side of This: The world simulation is a simulation in every sense of the word. Simply changing one value can have a ripple effect that affects any number of other data that influences the final scene composition.
  
  
• I make this sound bad, but it’s actually a great thing. This design and implementation ensures internal environment consistency and, for lack of a better word, “synergy” between what could be setup as disparate entities. This will also be helpful for ensuring future environments are bound to the same rules.
  

Quote:Note: Unfortunately, I didn’t properly create screenshots of each specific step along the way, but I do have a few iterations that I used to compare each tweak round. So those will appear shortly.

• The lighting and shading is fairly flat and trends far closer to orangey-orange than I want (even the mech shading was fairly flat).
  
  
• The “sun” (which I use in quotations constantly because it’s just a directional light that is treated as an atmospheric body) is somewhat non-existent. There is a somewhat brighter spot in its place, but it’s far more understated than I want.
  
  
• The haze is over-saturated and really drowns out the shading of distant buildings more than I’d like.
  
  
• Finally, though it’s not obvious here, but if any view other than the composition I’m using throughout this post, the eye adaptation was… Not happy. The histogram for the composition shot is fairly even, but anywhere else the overall exposure trends lower (which, since the composition I’m showing is potentially in the brightest areas in the environment).
  

• Start addressing the auto exposure so if I turned around I wasn’t blinded by the adjusted exposure for darker areas.
  
  
• This entailed lighting color/intensity (and volumetrics color/intenstiy which has its own modifiers based on the light color/intensity it gets from the directional light) adjustments. This succeeded in evening out the overall composition exposure throughout the environment, but it also made the lighting even more flat (and the composition somewhat darker).
  
  
• An attempt to change the haze distribution so it wouldn’t affect ground-level areas as intensely as it did in the first pass (also attempted, and failed, to fix the coloring).
  

• The composition’s contrast was way too heavy — even for me (and that’s saying something. I knew this wasn’t an issue with the post-processing stack, so I blamed the auto exposure. And turning off auto-exposure confirmed that… To some extent.
  
  
• The lighting intensity adjustments worked for most of the scene, but the smaller-scale details of the mech (which, by the way, is why I like this composition; it has foliage, large-scale meshes, and detailed smaller-scale meshes) weren’t benefitting from any changes to the intensity. Meaning that while most of the scene benefitted, shadowed areas were still suffering a bit.
  
  
• The haze was getting even more exaggerated from adjustments to the auto exposure. Which is neat.
  
  
• The “sun” still had an underwhelming compositional presence (and you can see the out-of-place blue halo here more clearly than in other images, despite not being occluded).
  

Quote:Note: I’ll show some debug shots of what the volumetrics themselves look like in the final composition later.