Bug description: The colour of tarmac changes quite dramatically. The further you move away from it the more accrurate it becomes. I want to create a dark grey apron and the closer I get to the tarmac the more washed out, overexposed, and brighter it gets. This is how it should look like (the colour)
Groundmering is disabled. PM is set to Concrete. Changing it to tarmac or Asphalt doesn’t change it.
Like this it is impossible to accurately re-create the real world counterpart. If you tweak it to look accurate when close up it is way too dark when on approach or flying around in drone cam, and when you tweak it to look good further away it is WAY too bright when taxiing. Please make the colour value fixed as this gives really inconsistent results Repro steps:
Seems like a pretty common behavior in MSFS2024. See the sky and mountains in the following video I took a few months back while experimenting with terrain colors:
I guess there will be a reason for it somewhere in “video physics” but only the Asobo team will be able to elaborate on this.
Certainly was much different back in MSFS2020 - where colors were more “static” while now they appear much more “dynamic” based on surrounding factors (which isn’t necessarily a bad thing).
In the case of the tarmac it is a bad thing. Asphalt does not change its colour by moving away from it. And if anything it only gets slightly lighter the further you move away and not darker.
This is way too exaggerated and it is impossible to make an accurate groundpoly with it.
In your case, the color change you’re seeing happens because the camera automatically adjusts the brightness of what it’s seeing (similar to how auto-exposure works on a real camera).
Between your close-up on the dark apron and the much brighter environment, the camera adapts, which results in your PM in the middle appearing darker.
@Sasa,
This one is different it seems to be a luminosity bug between the two terrain LODs.
If it’s game-related and hasn’t been reported yet, please open a new topic on the forums.
well, I understand that, but I don’t necessarily agree with it per se.
Even when not in drone cam, so when you are sat in the seat of your airplane, it is still the same and the apron is way brighter than it should be. When we are flying I am using a “point of view” view - though the eyes of my virtual character, not through a camera, so the camera auto exposure argument doesn’t really count for me in this case. Although I agree that your eyes also have some sort of “auto exposure” and adjust to the brightness outside, it doesn’t lead to such a visual change as seen in the sim (trust me I have been driving for a long time now and I never thought “omg why did the street just change colour”)
Whilst I agree that the autoexposure implementation is actually a good thing, I think it needs to be tuned or turned down a bit. Yes, maybe a slight change is okay, but definitely not as drastic as it is here. Like I said this doesn’t look like and exposure change, it straight up looks like the tarmac magically changing colour. My real problem with it is that it is impossible to match the colour of the Apron IRL. I tried making it darker and the colour change is actually better (less prominent) but then, again, it isn’t the same colour as it is IRL anymore.
Please take making slight adjustments to the exposure into consideration. This really ruins the look of some sceneries and limits our possibilities in how close we can recreate sceneries to their IRL counterpart. I agree that the exposure should change slightly, but it should definitely not influence the groundcolour as much as it does at the moment.
@Boris I want to reactivate this thread because the more I look at this the worse it gets. Tell me what you want but this is just not how either a camera nor human eyes work.
I just made another apron with dirt on it. An old and weathered concrete tile apron. And the further away you get, first of all the brighter it gets, and secondly the dirt just seems to disappear. I would greatly appreciate if you could tweak this because this is simply not how it should look and really does break immersion and ruin the intended look of sceneries.
We reviewed this using your textures and after some testing we can confirm that the behavior comes from mipmapping. The textures used for your apron lose detail as the LOD increases, which is by design and expected.
When the mip levels are generated, the contrast is reduced and the result tends to converge toward a more uniform grey that can look lighter (small dark details are averaged with larger lighter areas and for other textures it can be the opposite and they may look darker depending on the pattern).
To improve the result you can create your own mipmaps.
The recommended workflow is to generate a DDS from the PNG of your texture, then reopen the DDS to edit the mip levels and apply the necessary adjustments (for example, tweaking the contrast).
We tested this, and during the conversion to KTX2 the custom mipmaps from the DDS are preserved.
Thanks for testing it and thanks for the answer, Boris!
Is this process documented in the SDK documentation? I will try to figure it out myself but if this is not documented yet it would probably be a good idea to add that. Not only for me, but for others too since this is quite important for a lot of groundtextures in 2024 and also essential since the default system seems to do a poor job in preserving the look of the texture.
