Right RGB Colors for day&night cycle?

Newbie & Debugging Questions
#1

Hello,

even its a stupid question, there is no perfect color for my request because every people here has a different taste.
But i need to ask what RGB floats do you would use for example a game with 4 states of a day?

MORNING
DAY
DAWN
NIGHT

At the moment i just “trial and error” and it is very annoying.

Is there any Website to figure out or can you give some advice?

#2

The most common values are dark bluish for night, orange for morning/dawn and white for day, possibly with a small tint of orange there too.

Something like
morning: (0.6, 0.4, 0.3)
day: (1.0, 0.9, 0.8 )
dawn: (0.6, 0.4, 0.3)
night (0.1, 0.1, 0.2), could be darker.

You can tweak these values as you want, but approximately these ratios between colors usually work well.

#3

Thank you very much. Saves hours of testing ;D

#4

These ratios work decently well for HDR effects too, but they depend a bit on your tone mapping functions as well, so may require additional tweaking.

#5

Hmm… idk. When I look outside at day it’s usually more blueish and not red at all. More like:
(0.7, 0.9, 1.0)
I guess it depends on where on earth you live (i.e. how near the sun gets to the zenith).

#6

Here are some values I’ve used. I wanted everything to still be quite easily visible at night so that you can see what you’re doing, so it doesn’t get overly dark. I also used values for each hour, rather than only each time period because dawn and dusk have a more rapid light level transition compared to the gradual transitions going into and after mid day and mid night, so this gives better control over that transition rate.

	{{0.4f, 0.4f, 0.7f},// 12am
	{0.4f, 0.4f, 0.7f},// 1am
	{0.4f, 0.4f, 0.7f},// 2am
	{0.4f, 0.4f, 0.7f},// 3am
	{0.4f, 0.4f, 0.7f},// 4am 
	{0.7f, 0.4f, 0.7f},// 5am //before sunrise
	{1.0f, 0.6f, 0.7f},// 6am //sunrise
	{1.0f, 0.8f, 0.8f},// 7am //after sunrise
	{1.0f, 1.0f, 0.9f},// 8am 
	{1.0f, 1.0f, 1.0f},// 9am
	{1.0f, 1.0f, 1.0f},// 10am
	{1.0f, 1.0f, 1.0f},// 11am
	{1.0f, 1.0f, 1.0f},// 12pm
	{1.0f, 1.0f, 1.0f},// 1pm
	{1.0f, 1.0f, 1.0f},// 2pm
	{1.0f, 1.0f, 1.0f},// 3pm
	{1.0f, 1.0f, 1.0f},// 4pm
	{1.0f, 1.0f, 1.0f},// 5pm
	{1.0f, 1.0f, 1.0f},// 6pm
	{1.0f, 1.0f, 0.9f},// 7pm 
	{1.0f, 0.8f, 0.8f},// 8pm //before sunset
	{1.0f, 0.6f, 0.7f},// 9pm //sunset
	{0.7f, 0.4f, 0.7f},// 10pm //after sunset
	{0.4f, 0.4f, 0.7f}}// 11pm
#7

The sun is always a little bit red/orange due to the blue light being scattered more heavily. Due to this, the direct light from the sun is orange, but the light from the sky is blue. In direct illumination from the sun, these two should roughly cancel out resulting in white. In addition, nights aren’t actually blue; this is just a stylization thing that is very common in games and movies to visualize nighttime, and people are quite used to it, so they interpret it as nighttime. Basically, I answered with values that I believe “look good”. They aren’t based on IRL colors.