Review: REX Atmos

Away with the clouds of despair!

You may have seen my recent Head to Head article, which was about two add-ons that replace the stock MSFS vegetation with better-looking models and seasonal textures. I told you that the stock vegetation was one subject that left many people unsatisfied, especially with the lack of seasons. 

What if I told you that there was another subject in MSFS that has been less than pleasing to the eye? You’d probably say: “Joeri, you don’t have to tell us, we all know that the clouds in stock MSFS look like they came straight out of Mount Etna.” Well, okay, then let me tell you that developer REX may have provided us with a solution for this problem, with the brand-new add-on “Atmos”. In this review, we will go over its features, explain how it works and showcase the differences between it and stock MSFS. 

About Atmos

So what is Atmos and what does it do, exactly? REX describes it as a visual enhancement tool which allows you to transform the world, atmosphere, and weather like never before. The tool directly connects to MSFS’s lighting and weather engine, allowing you to change things like ozone, Rayleigh scattering (light scattering), cloud and sky colour and cloud volume. It does much more than just putting an adjustment layer between your monitor and the simulator, which is what a shader does. And that is a comment which I have seen a lot in threads regarding Atmos: “Shaders or Nvidia filters achieve exactly the same for free”. But Atmos certainly goes further than that. You can customize the atmosphere and weather in just about any way, shape and form. 

The add-on is a separate program which you have to run alongside your sim. Once MSFS is up and running, it will connect to the sim automatically. The program comes with three main categories, which each allow you to tailor different parts of the sim to your liking: Weather, Atmos(phere) and Enviro(nment). I will talk about how these work exactly later on in the review. 

A good thing to note as well is that Atmos is claimed to be completely compatible with other weather engines, such as REX’s own Weather Force or HiFi’s Active Sky FS. I have only tested Atmos with the stock MSFS weather engine, however. 

User experience

Installation of the program is easy, fast and hardly takes up any disk space at all. Once you have it installed, it is time to boot it up. You’ll be presented with the three main aforementioned options: Weather, Atmos and Enviro. 

Weather

When you get into the weather menu, you are first presented with three sub menus, where you can choose a weather system of your liking. You can pick between live weather, importing a METAR, creating your own custom weather, or a preset made by someone else. For the most part, the weather menu is not too dissimilar to the weather settings already present in MSFS by default.

  • Live Weather makes it possible to tune MSFS’s live weather with the enhancements of Atmos. And just to be clear: Live Weather in Atmos is NOT another weather engine. It purely makes use of whatever weather engine you are already using.
  • METAR weather allows you to import weather from anywhere in the world, to anywhere in the world. Meaning, you could start a flight in Quinoa, Peru, but import weather from Bean in Kent, UK. 
  • Custom weather opens up all customizable options that Atmos has to offer, or to use public presets previously created by other people. If you decide to customize your own weather, you will have the ability to work with three cloud layers, which you can individually tweak exactly like you already can with the default MSFS weather tool. Then there is another tab called “Precip/storm”, which allows you to tinker with precipitation and lightning. And finally, there is a tab called “Surface”, which allows you to change things like wind speed and direction, and humidity. 

A few features Atmos provides you in all weather options, that MSFS doesn’t have by default, are options to tweak Cloud Softness, Cloud Variability and Cloud Enhancements. 

Cloud Softness allows you to tweak the softness and overall volume of the clouds, making clouds on a sweet summer day look like fuzzy cotton candy, while clouds in a thunderstorm can be tweaked to look extra mean and thick.

Cloud Variability offers you a different look of clouds under the same conditions. The feature is more useful than it sounds. I’ve had several times when I had a specific weather preset with the exact parameters I wanted, but it just didn’t look quite right. A quick little swish on the cloud variability slider offered me an entirely different look within the same weather parameters, which just provided that extra visual edge.

Cloud Enhancements is where the magic happens. Just one tweak in this slider will completely transform all your clouds from ash gray, to bright white with a blue hue. You can overdo this one though, more on that under Results and Comparisons.

Atmos

This feature allows you to easily tweak lighting values, removing the yellow tints that plague MSFS by default and turning the dark gray clouds a much more accurate white. You can either choose to customize it yourself completely, or simply use a preset that has been made by somebody else. Speaking of which, you can use the preset I created by searching for “FSElite” in the tool itself. This theme looks good in every scenario, but not perfect in any. Perfection requires manual tweaking, more on that below. 

Enviro

Enviro allows you to play with the colours of both terrain and vegetation. You can use it to make nature less or more vibrant, or to mimic seasons. However, if you’re like me, then you’ll turn the colour sliders all the way down, except for the blue one, play “Eiffel 65 – Blue” on Spotify and fly around a blue da ba dee da ba di world.

Jokes aside, I personally don’t see the point of the Enviro options. It basically allows you to do what add-ons like Orbx’s Global Trees HD or REX’s AccuSeason do, but poorly. I’d suggest getting one of those add-ons instead. If you would like to know which one of those is best for you, you may enjoy our Head To Head: Orbx Global Trees HD and REX AccuSeason Advanced article.

Results and Comparisons

Generally, the results I got out of Atmos were considerable improvements over stock MSFS. The skies actually looked sky-blue, the clouds looked bright white and the light seemed to scatter a lot more realistically, specifically under more humid conditions, which is something I specifically enjoyed. 

The problem I definitely faced several times with Atmos, however, is that whatever looked good when I just tweaked everything, didn’t necessarily look good further down the flight. This is because you tweak Atmos based on your current time and weather. If any or both of those values change, which they always do during a flight, then your sim may end up looking weird at a later stage of the flight. 

This issue becomes especially apparent once you witness the transition from day to night. Colours can start to look increasingly odd, and bright lights can suddenly appear way too bright and bloomy. The only way to fix that is to go back into Atmos and tweak all the Enviro options all over again, or by just using a theme which looks good enough in any scenario, but never perfect. 

Though I have to say that after tinkering with Atmos settings for a long time, I genuinely think that the sunsets in stock MSFS actually hold up really well. The sunset in MSFS, however, definitely has a more Summer-like look, with a bright orange transition. Whereas, a winter sunset can often look more pinkish and a bit less vibrant overall. This is another area where Atmos does allow you to customize the colour to represent this setting more. But it once again does require you to jump back into Atmos to tweak little values, just to achieve the perfect look, as there simply isn’t one single perfect weather and time setting. 

This leads me to the following: The very first key feature on the Atmos page of REX’s store reads “Simple and easy to use”. And for a big part, it is! But for another part, it also really isn’t. For example, it really isn’t plug-and-play. You have to take the time to experiment with it, to properly learn its features and how to utilize them. And then, after flying for an hour or so, you find out that the weather and lighting have entirely changed, and you may have to tweak everything all over again. 

Another thing to keep in mind is that Atmos is also easy to “over-tweak”. What I mean with this, is that it’s rather intuitive to just yeet all the sliders for cloud enhancement and cloud harshness to the max, as this will surely give the best results, right? Unfortunately, no. Some options can cause some seriously strange artefacts.

By cranking cloud harshness to the maximum, for example, you will get some thicker and darker-looking clouds with stronger outlines. From the ground looking up, this looks ideal for rain clouds, or stormy clouds. But once you break out of the clouds and look at them from above, you will notice that they look very grainy and that they are morphing. 

Cranking cloud enhancement all the way up, on the other hand, will cause all clouds to look white and bright, which is nice if you are after those nice white and puffy clouds. But it does look odd when you have more rainy or stormy weather, where it basically has the opposite effect of the default MSFS clouds and looks too white for the setting. You can drag the slider back a little bit to compensate for that, but the slider is very sensitive. Basically 0-50% does nothing, 51-53% is the full gray to white transition and then 54-100% is completely white clouds. 

There are also features under the atmos section of the tool which can cause some very strange artefacts. Ambient light, for example, can create some very strange sun reflections, and it can also cause extreme reflection and blooming issues on your aircraft.

All in all, every weather scenario requires careful tweaking of every setting slider to gain the perfect results. And that brings me back once again to the claim of Atmos being an easy-to-use program. Yes, it is if you’re happy with “good enough”. But if you want the perfect representation of say, a rainy day, then the program can keep you busy for a long time, while dispatch is losing their patience as you just missed your 5th time slot. 

Once you have created a theme for either weather, atmos or enviro, you can easily save it to your account by pressing the save button. You can also select whether you want to make your theme publicly available to the rest of the Atmos users, or you can use themes made public by other users for yourself. The only downside is that once you’ve found a nice public theme which was made by someone else, that there is no way to either save this theme to your Atmos, or to mark it as a favourite. 

Quickly hooking onto the topic of performance, I didn’t notice any performance impact at all. 

Conclusion

Is REX Atmos a good buy, or should you just wave it goodbye? I think that Atmos absolutely is a good addition to MSFS. It’s far from perfect, but the way that it transforms the sim is worth every penny in my opinion. I just wish it was easier to use. More of a: You set some parameters once in an initial setup, and the tool takes care of the rest. It irritates me that I have to change the Atmos settings to get the best out of different weather scenarios. It also bothers me that I have to manually boot up the program and initialize an atmos and weather preset, every time I do a flight. But once you become familiar with the program and learn its quirks, the results are undeniably astonishing. 

More From:   REX Simulations
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Joeri Veenhuizen
I started on FS2000 and CFS1 as a 7 year old kid and I have been in love with flight simulation and aviation ever since, even turning it into my profession as designer for Dovetail Games. Here I worked on FSX SE, Flight School, Flight Sim World and the early foundations of MSFS. These days you can either find me doing short hops within Europe in MSFS, or shooting down bad guys in IL-2. My favorite airplane IRL is the DC-3 Dakota!

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