An Honest Question About Map Lighting

Ok,

So I'm sure you all know of the Nurburgring map featured in this video (download in the description)



And I can't help but notice how good it looks. Even in my game.



The shadows are deeper, the highlights are crisper, the midtones are vivid and the over all thing has a cinematic blue tint to it. This is completely stock.

What I'd like to know is if it is possible to use this lighting on all stock maps in the game? And if so, which files would contain such lighting that are copyable? I just think it looks so much better than the stock maps' lighting and it's no where near as washed out.

Thanks for any help

 

For the shadows, you can follow this tutorial:
https://www.beamng.com/threads/lets-talk-shadows.80331/

 

Thank you!

 

Just be aware that when you use these settings on other maps (and on this one, but it isn't as noticeable due to less overhanging trees, you will notice that making the closer shadows better quality will often reduce the quality of the more distant shadows. I posted on reddit about it too as I wasn't aware of the tutorial linked above (which is much better), but here it is anyway: https://www.reddit.com/r/BeamNG/comments/p6p3ln/shadows/

 

I put in a lot of time into the map's lighting, glad someone noticed! lol

The main thing that I did was turn the lighting brightness in the ScatterSky way up - normally it's set to 1.0, but I think I had it set to 7.0 on this map. Makes shadows look darker and it really brings out the color in PBR materials. Unfortunately, it kinda brings out too much color in materials like the tinted glass on some cars. It's a small price to pay for sweet highlights.

The more subtle lighting, like the blue tint, come from the level's static reflections. Level objects and non-player vehicles only use static reflections instead of dynamic, and none of BeamNG's default cubemaps matched the brightness of the level. Through experimentation, I found out that BeamNG supports HDR textures (high dynamic range, basically images that can go beyond 255 color values), and so I used an HDR sky cubemap with a higher exposure, causing all level PBR materials to be cast with a slight blue tint from the sky, most noticeably in shadows. (This technique is known as Image Based Lighting, if you're familiar with 3D rendering.) The blue tint is then contrasted by yellow/orange sunlight, so you get "warm" light and "cool" shadows, giving a very filmic look.

It's worth noting that I had to go and manually adjust pretty much all of the PBR materials I already made by that point to better fit the lighting, so just copying my lighting settings probably won't give ideal results, especially to the stock levels since they're not even PBR yet.

 

Thanks for such an elaborate reply! Since I created this thread, I've learned a lot about BeamNG lighting and I'm glad that its not a dead subject to the community. Also, I really love playing on your maps, they are some of the most detailed map ports I have seen so far and I'm glad that they enspired me to learn what I have.