Envshade presets: natural and balanced palettes and lighting effects.
I’ve now upgraded to P3Dv5 but, sadly, did not have room on my system to retain my old P3Dv4.5. This means I can no longer develop or test PTA or Tomatoshade presets, as neither have been updated for P3Dv5. So … I’ve decided to try TOGA’s Envshade – which is available from: www.togaprojects.com.
Currently, I only have EnvShade installed, so the first preset (Adam Env 1314_01) doesn’t take any EnvTEX textures into account – using instead some sky/cloud textures from the beta ActiveSky/ASCA.
I will shortly be running the full TOGA set of utilities, so future presets will be developed/balanced for use with EnvTEX.
As with PTA or Tomatoshade presets, these Envshade presets are averaged/balanced to work across the board:
- All times of the day.
- All P3D seasons*.
- All sky/cloud textures (regardless of texture-generation application).
* Using different presets to match the palettes for each P3D season would require frequent sim restarts and rebuilds of the shaders cache – especially if you jump from one hemisphere to another in the same session. Using a single year-round preset is much more practical.
These presets require HDR mode in P3D to be enabled: make sure you set the correct values for each preset. Though P3D HDR values can be tweaked “live” in-sim (to suit user preferences or weather conditions), bear in mind that even small changes in settings can have a significant impact on the final output.
NOTE: The three Envshade HDR-specific tweaks need a full P3D restart to take effect. It may take a while for the textures/shaders to rebuild the first time you run P3D after a preset change – this is normal.