Realtime Walkthrough Controls

The following controls are available during a Realtime Walkthrough.

The Realtime Walkthrough controls are different than the ones used when creating and editing your landscape design. The walkthrough controls are much simpler because the walkthrough is only for viewing your design, not editing it.

Important: Many of the Realtime Walkthrough features require a modern 3D video card. Features which are not supported by your video card will not be available.

Color and Brightness Settings

Press F4 to open the Color and Brightness dialog.

Brightness
Adjusts the brightness of surfaces illuminated by the global light.

Ambient
Adjusts the brightness of surfaces which are not directly illuminated by the global light, either because they are facing away or because they are in shadow.

Exposure
Adjusts the overall brightness of the scene.

Contrast
Adjusts the sharpness of colors in the scene. When increasing the contrast, it is often helpful to decrease the saturation by a similar amount to prevent the colors from becoming oversaturated.

Saturation
Adjusts how vivid the colors appear in the scene.

Bloom
Adjusts the size of the glow that appears around brightly lit objects. During the daytime, this affects highly reflective objects such as water and glossy paint. At night, this adjusts the size of the glow around light fixtures. To disable bloom, set this value to -100.

Red/Green/Blue balance
Adjusts the red, green, and blue lighting of the entire scene.

Reset
Reset all settings to their default (0).

Save/Load
Save or  load the settings to or from disk. This is useful when you want to use these settings in another design.

Graphics Settings

Press F7 to open the Graphics Settings dialog.

These settings are very performance intensive and require a modern video card for best results. If you experience slow performance, try disabling one or more of the following settings.

3D grass
Enables or disables 3D grass. 3D grass will only appear if supported by your video card, and you have Regions in your design with the 3D grass option enabled.

Sunlight lens flare
Enables or disables the lens flare that appears when looking directly at the sun.

Water caustics
Enables or disables underwater light effects caused by light refracting through the surface of rippling water.

Water reflections
Enables or disables reflections of the surrounding environment on water surfaces. When disabled, reflections are still present but are less accurate.

Ambient occlusion
Enables or disables detailed shadows that appear where surfaces are partially shadowed by nearby surfaces. For example, this provides subtle shadows on individual blades of grass.

Character shadows
Enables or disables dynamic shadows cast by 3D people.

Enable all settings during a movie or screen shot
When this option is enabled, all of the above settings are automatically enabled for movies and screen shots. This allows you to disable certain settings for improved walkthrough performance, while maintaining maximum quality for movies and screen shots.

See also:

Realtime Walkthrough
Realtime Walkthrough Settings
Saving and Restoring Viewpoints
Taking a Screen Shot