How to get Great Realistic Visuals from Space Engine?

[u/IllustriousQuail8681]

I'm Totally New to Space Engine, I just bought it yesterday on Steam, and i don't see many guides on visuals besides one made using an AI Voiceover i found on youtube and i don't know if that video is really accurate or not, so i wanted to take asking about visuals to the community because I don't know heads or tails of the visuals

First, My pc specs are: Ryzen 7 5800x3d, 32gb DDR4, AMD RX 7700XT 12GB GDDR6

okay specs out the way, i want to max out the colors and visuals so they look accurate, vibrant, and realistic if that makes sense, and I'm not sure how to go about that, i mean i can tune settings well, just not necessarily Space Engine's i know there's steam workshop stuff but I'm not sure which Mods to download to maximize realism, color accuracy and Color vibrancy, sorry if i repeated myself I'm not very good with explaining my thoughts as well as i like :(

Any Advice And Suggestions will help thank you so much!

[u/icy-winter-ghost]

If you play on Steam and you are fine with installing mods, you can download Rodrigo's Mod. The mod changes how the planets look, both in colours, texture and the shape of landmasses (meaning that planets with water and landmasses' shores look 'sharper' and more refined instead of the vanilla shores' more 'rounded' edges).

English is not my first language, so I apologise if I didn't make any sense

[u/IllustriousQuail8681 → u/icy-winter-ghost]

as a native english speaker myself i say this, you did awesome man, if i may ask what is your native language, you dont have to answer if you dont want to, but still thank you for your reply to my post

[u/icy-winter-ghost → u/IllustriousQuail8681]

Thank you! My native language is Danish :)

[u/TheBuzwell → u/icy-winter-ghost]

It's been my experience that a lot of Danes speak better English than a lot of my countrymen do, and I'm Scottish!

[u/DelightfullyDivisive → u/TheBuzwell]

It has been my experience that a lot of Danes speak better English than Scots do as well. Or at least, I find it easier to understand them...

[u/TheBuzwell → u/DelightfullyDivisive]

Aye, we can be an unintelligible bunch ahah

[u/IllustriousQuail8681 → u/icy-winter-ghost]

another language to learn! your language is indeed awesome

[u/DominikDoom]

Aside from mods, I would recommend experimenting with the tone map and lens flare settings in SE to find the ones you like most, they can change the look a lot and the defaults aren't the best in my opinion. Other than that, the most important part is the camera exposure which you can change in the bottom right flyout menu. Depending on the shot, Manual / Auto can look a lot better than HDR.

[u/CafePinguino]

I'm curious about how to tune or mod the game to look as it would look if I was viewing everything with the naked eye. Like, how bright the galaxy core regions look, or how dark would Pluto really be, etc

[u/cubosh → u/CafePinguino]

no need to mod -- setting the camera mode to "automatic" emulates human eye limitations and brightness. it even has the delay like if you look at a star and then look away, your eyes "adjust" to see the distant stars after a few seconds

[u/CafePinguino → u/cubosh]

Yeah. But when I'm in the night side of earth like planets the sky looks to bright and can't see almost any star. Or if I go to Pluto it looks like daylight

[u/donatelo200 → u/CafePinguino]

Pluto would actually still be pretty bright given you experience that every day in an office. You can experience Pluto light levels outside about 5 minutes after sunset too as well.

For the nights being bright I did fix that with this mod: https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3754627390

The bright nights were caused by the atmosphere not fully cutting off mei scattering. Which I fixed with like 3 lines of code lol.

Edit: You can find you Pluto time by putting your coordinates here. https://davemcw.com/plutotime/

[u/CafePinguino → u/donatelo200]

Thank you!!

[u/cubosh → u/CafePinguino]

exposure can be pushed down or up with the comma/period keys. planets with thick atmospheres will indeed block most of the stars from view in the sky

[u/CafePinguino → u/cubosh]

Yeah. But when I'm in the night side of earth like planets the sky looks to bright and can't see almost any star. Or if I go to Pluto it looks like daylight

[u/cubosh]

frequently hit the V key to toggle between camera modes HDR and Automatic.  either of them are good for differing scenarios

[u/IndependentTime4747]

Change your camera mode to Auto mode

sorry if my english is bad english is not my native language