Why does nintendo games portray early sunrise as green?
I have never in my life seen a sunrise in these colors. I used to witness them a lot during college by doing all-nighters and they always had the same colors as a sunset. But in ACNH as well as both BOTW and TOTK the early sunrise has this green tint to it? Is this a thing?
Not to game art graduate my way in here but I think I have an explanation. If the sunrises aren’t deliberately green, they might be incidentally green based on the art assets and how the graphics engine displays them, much like a semi-famous problem painters run into with sunrises.
It makes sense if you think of it that way; orange or yellow assets/lighting/textures, when overlaid with blue ones, mix to green after the computer does the math. To achieve the gradients we see in a sunrise, like in the image below, totally different methods often have to be used like applying a custom color ramp or levels adjustments, or baking a skybox animation with the specific colors you want and not letting the computer interpolate between them at its own whims.
[Caption; sunrise in Seattle, with the space needle and city skyline visible. The sky is a rich peach at the bottom, moving to a golden orange, then a pale beige, and finally sky blue.]
It’s a challenge a lot of traditional painters encounter, too; painting sunrises without creating “green” requires not letting any of the blue or orange paints mix. But mixing wet paint is often the only way to create soft gradients. So you see a lot of green sunrises there. It might be that the same thing is happening in both mediums, since colors have the same relationships whether it’s additive or subtractive mixing.
[Caption; four classical paintings of sunrises that each feature green skies, or gradients that include them, with colors visibly different than the sunrise photograph. Individual paintings and artists listed at end of post.]
Why the sky actually looks like those colors specifically in real life is probably a really interesting thing I learned from a James Gurney book at one point, and then forgot, but I do notice the gradients look a lot more like a light kelvin scale; going from warm, to neutral, to cool.
Without knowing if that has anything to do with it, I know painters have managed to make it work by painting the transitions from orange to neutral, and blue to neutral, separately. I’ve been out of the game enough that I wonder exactly what techniques digital artists are doing to avoid the problem in skyboxes. I’d be curious to know what the Rockstar devs were doing for RDD2, for example, since those sunrises look perfect.
[Caption; a sunrise from the game Red Dead Redemption. The colors more closely match the first photograph from Seattle.]
Anyway, those are my best guesses. Hoping someone can confirm, expand upon, or debunk any elements of this post as required.
[Paintings from earlier in clockwise order;
- Evening, Owens Lake, California by Albert Bierstadt
- A Mountainous Landscape with a Waterfall, Sunrise by Jens Juel
- Sunrise, Atlantic City by William Trost Richards
- Sunrise by Albert Bierstadt]
The sky looks those colors in real life due to Rayleigh scattering! As the light from the sun interacts with the gasses in the atmosphere, different frequencies interact with the gasses in different ways. High frequency blue light gets scattered and redirected from its original path pretty easily, but lower frequency light actually passes through the atmosphere more easily.
This means that the atmosphere works as a stronger lens for blue light than for other colors! Basically when you look at a part of the sky away from the sun and see blue, you are in a sense seeing a blurry image of the sun, but only the blue parts.
When the sun is low in the sky the sunlight has to pass through much more atmosphere, and more of the thicker and more chemically interesting gasses that are produced near the surface. This means that more of the light has a chance to get redirected by the atmosphere, including the redder frequencies. Blue light, on the other hand, gets *too* scattered when the sun is low. It gets scattered so much that it stops contributing much to the overall color of the sky.
So, when you are looking near the sun the light you are seeing is the light that got scattered a small amount by the gasses in the atmosphere. The further from the sun you are looking, the more the light you are seeing had to be scattered to reach you. When the sun is near the horizon, the thickness of the atmosphere between you and the sun scatters the higher frequencies of light so much that the low (reddish) frequencies dominate the colors you see. As you look further from the sun the higher more scattered frequencies dominate.
Because green light is an intermediate frequency between red light and blue light, there’s no situation where in real life the atmosphere scatters only green light. it’s always mixed with light from the rest of the spectrum, so the “green” areas of the sky, the areas where green light is scattered just the right amount for you to see it, actually look pale and uncolorful because the rest of the spectrum is there too
