Vanilla+ Tonemapper
Acknowledgement
Thank you, Inthegrave, for making sure I actually finish this.
Description
Vanilla+ Tonemapper is a lightweight shader replacer that adds a proper tonemapping curve to Fallout New Vegas, fixing the worst cases of blown out whites, while keeping true to the vanilla aesthetic.
Tonemapping is a technique in HDR rendering which makes sure that what the colors that gets displayed to the user are in a proper range, avoiding clipping and potentialy other issues. Fallout New Vegas can, in fact, render in HDR, but instead of applying such a curve it just clips the values. It leads to this weird situation where certain parts of the screen are clearly blown out - full white - killing all detail and being generally hard to look at. To a certain degree, wonky lighting is a part of the visual identity of FNV. However, the lack of tonemapping in particular can lead to very obvious problems with the image.
Technicalities aside, this concept is best explained not in words, but in pictures. In the Images section, you will find a selection of screenshots showcasing vanilla and two modded weathers (Weathers Revised and Desert Natural Weathers), with and without the tonemapper active, and also with the tonemapper and an optional sky brightness tweak that compensates for the tonemapper (relevant primarily for DNW).
To complement the tonemapping, using fixed assets with properly toned normal maps is paramount. For a vanilla friendly variant, I recommend MAC-TEN for meshes and LENT for tweaked normal maps.
Optional Component
As several users noticed, the tonemapper resulted in the sky with DNW to be quite dull. I have added a scriptrunner tweak that patches all weather IMODs used during the day (not night) to compensate for this with increased brightness. See the effect in Images.
Requirements
- Shader Loader - NVSE
- JIP LN NVSE [Optional, used for the Sky Brightness Tweak]
Installation
Install as normal. Load order does not matter.
Source Code
Vanilla Plus Tonemapper
Main file: Tonemapping shader.
Vanilla Plus Tonemapper - Sky Brightness Tweak
Optional file: Sky brightness tweak if you find the sky too dull with the tonemapper.
