C13 AEGIS 1.54 - Pure 0.234, glare profiles and more (Patreon)

Happy, heathy and successful 2024 everyone! I hope the year ahead brings you joy, happiness, love and friendship.

But in the meantime:
There's been  another period of rapid prototyping so the version jump may seem significant to those not fully up to date in the Discord, but things are in a pretty good place right now. What started as an experiment in live glare shape switching, devolved into various tone mapping adjustments, and eventually into tweaking the new ambient light model that Pure 0.234 brings to deliver top of the line visuals (almost) day 1.

The changes from 1.49 aren't earth shattering but they're there, so let's touch on a few points.
During some code housekeeping in noticed more 1.0 remnants that didn't quite fit the internal logic since the introduction of color profiles, so some adjustments in the color science had to be made. Minor adjustments to the base color progression, and some changes to the color profiles themselves. The AEGIS profile got a rebalancing to mostly maintain it's visuals, NFS got rebalanced to be a touch more neutral. Overall, I'm still extremely pleased and proud of the color reproduction of the filter.

Calibration sliders
Beyond this, I've introduced a new way to calibrate the filter to your screen/display device.

These sliders allow you to influence the tone mapping curve, to boost the midtones, while avoiding losing all contrast or blowing out the highlights (within reason, +1 for day will be very bright. The Day and Night value aren't actually tied to sun position, but are interpolated via Auto Exposure, ensuring appropriate behavior in tunnels etc.

Glare presets
The future is now old man! Thanks to Ilja and Peter, we now have access to almost the full suite of YEBIS glare shape properties, and thanks to a bit of C13 Magic, this access is now leveraged to provide individual glare presets. Select one just as you would a color profile, go nuts, have fun!

C13 AEGIS

GT

Gentle

Lens Flare

Blinding

Beware blinding. It's blinding.

Ambient light V2
And finally, let's talk Ambient Light V2 that arrived with Pure 0.234. Major Kudos to Peter, the new aspects of ambient light, which more accurately approximate general luminance, radiosity, sky brightness and much more, generally looks amazing. Once calibrated. Which is what I've been doing for the past few days. I think it overall looks great, though it's subtle in a side by side.

Old Ambient

Ambient V2

You'll notice minor lighting and hue changes, the overall effect is actually very profound, while still not lending itself well to a SBS comparison. This will be activated by default if you're running the Pure 0.234, so you don't need to dig through pure settings. The result of this new change is also the deactivation of some old adjustments whereby i faked some of these effects at filter level. So for the best look, pair C13 AEGIS 1.54 with Pure 0.234.

Beyond these, there have been other tweaks to glare, tone mapping, reflections etc. that complement the various new changes, and I think overall the filter looks balanced and amazing. Do lmk if I messed something up colossally though, I'm fully aware that's possible.

As always, thank you so much for your support.

Minor update, i missed a small AE related detail with ambient V2, causing AE to be a bit too high in some scenarios.