How do you guys balance bright snow?

[evok99]

I really like how high Direct Lighting values look along with high Bloom. It looks good everywhere unless you are up in snowy areas and then the ground is blown out. How do I set local weather for specific areas? And how do I determine which area I am in? I know how to do specific weather, just not specific locations.

[Pfuscher]

You could also change the brightness or specular of the 2 main snow textures+1road

[evok99]

Thank you! How do I change the specular of the texture? Which program would I need for that.

[mindflux]

Unless my memory plays tricks on me, specular should be in the alpha channel of a normal map, and making it darker with Photoshop or GIMP (free alternative, not sure if you need a plugin for importing and exporting dds files) will reduce spec (black = no spec, white = max spec). I guess you could also use Nifskope to edit the shaders for the corresponding terrain meshes, might be even be quicker.

Lowering bloom intensity can also help quite a bit since it's a killer in the snowy areas, but that might not be a viable option if it's important to your preset.

[evok99]

Unless my memory plays tricks on me, specular should be in the alpha channel of a normal map, and making it darker with Photoshop or GIMP (free alternative, not sure if you need a plugin for importing and exporting dds files) will reduce spec (black = no spec, white = max spec). I guess you could also use Nifskope to edit the shaders for the corresponding terrain meshes, might be even be quicker.

Lowering bloom intensity can also help quite a bit since it's a killer in the snowy areas, but that might not be a viable option if it's important to your preset.

I guess I will use GIMP, but it doesn't natively support dds files. I tried the plugin but it doesn't seem to be working, it is out of date.

[mindflux]

This one? https://code.google.com/archive/p/gimp-dds/downloads

[evok99]

I got it to work! Now time to figure out how to effect the specular. No clue which setting that is under.

[evok99]

I have edited my snow textures, including the Lod and it looks much better, but the snow brightness in the distance is still really bright, even with ENB turned off:

ENB ON:
ScreenShot500 by branden korth, on Flickr

ENB OFF:
ScreenShot502 by branden korth, on Flickr

What is that texture so I can fix it?

[EvoFq3o0]

will be the snow lod's that are bright now evo99k.