There are a ton of fantastic weather mods, ENB presets, etc. available on the Nexus and each one is nice in its own way. I like ENB, it looks amazing, but it has many visual glitches and affects performance in a way that is often a bit distracting for me. As far as weather mods go, I LOVE URWL and Nevada Skies, but they didn't seem to fit my NVR/Reshade preset in just the way I wanted. By using Reshade and NVR we can get high quality visuals with  basically 0 performance hit.

I did not start out with the intention of making a weather mod, I started out with the idea of making a New Vegas Reloaded preset for Vanilla weathers. I quickly realized that combining NVR with Reshade, was giving me really nice results and very good performance, but I couldn't seem to fine tune things exactly the way I wanted, so I decided to make a custom weather plugin to compliment my preset and HDR Weather And Color was born. 

So this is my attempt at improving the visuals for New Vegas using a combination of techniques, based on vanilla weathers. I have of course taken inspiration from other great weather and visual mods, but kept a keen eye on simplicity. 

Here are the key points:

1. Vanilla enhancement

Instead of adding tons of brand new weathers, I have decided only to edit Vanilla weathers for New Vegas and DLC's where necessary. I haven't made changes to climates, or regions, or world spaces, so you can generally expect the type of weather that the vanilla game would have assigned for a given region, but with my improvements. You can also turn on the weather and rain enhancements in the included INI file, and the mod will distribute a small hand full of enhanced vanilla weathers and rain throughout the wasteland for added variety. These are not new weathers, they are simply the enhanced version of the vanilla weathers added to the wasteland.

As far as NVR and Reshade, I tried to focus the settings on color and bloom since I feel this is where New Vegas needs the most help, and its what I miss from ENB in particular.

In general, There are many weathers that are untouched, as I wanted to retain the vanilla feel. If it already looked good, or an important thematic choice had been made by the developers, (I.E. dead money red toxic cloud weather) I left the weathers alone. 

In terms of my thought process on creating these weather changes, I have mainly focused on five key factors:

• Darkening nights to be playable, but look like actual nights.
• Fixing sky and horizon anomalies where possible
• Creating better looking sunrises, and sunsets.
• Enhancing clouds
• Fixing distracting Fog settings, and enhancing them to work with NVR depth of field  
  

2.Simple Scripted enhancements

The mod has a hand full of scripted quality of life options that can be controlled with an ini file. A small hand full of these options need to run in the background in order to check if you're in an interior or not. They use a constant magic effect with a condition check. Turn them off and the mod can be considered to have 0 script overhead. 

• FaceLight - This adds a subtle skin colored light to player in order to help with the horrible shadows the lighting engine adds to faces when no direct light is available. I have added a scripted function to adjust the percentage that light plays in sneak detection, to compensate for the light added to the player. Turning this off in the INI restores the default value at the time the mod was installed. 
  

• Skin Glare Fix - Adds an overall skin dimmer to compensate for when the sun is making skin too shiny This is additive meaning it will be added to whatever IMOD settings the current weather has. Turn it off in the INI if you don't like it
  

• Sun Glare Fix - Same as above but adds an overall sun dimmer to compensate for when the sun is making objects too shiny. This can make it feel a bit less "hot" and lose some of the desert feel, so it is turned off by default. I think my Bloom settings in NVR compensate for this well enough but some may like it.
  

• Interior Color Fix (Runs in the background) - This adjusts the light and color of interiors to look a bit less saturated and yellow. It is dynamic, meaning it turns on and off when entering and exiting interiors, and is added on top of whatever color and light the cell already uses. Fully compatible with other interior lighting mods.
  

• Add Weathers - This adds a hand full of my edited vanilla weathers to the wasteland for more variety. Turning this off restores the default Climate settings for all regions. 
  

• Add Rain - This adds my edited Honest Hearts Rain weather to the wasteland for more variety. there is a 10% chance of rain to occur. Turning this off removes the rain chance for all regions. 
• Invisible Cloud fix (Runs in the background) - This fixes clouds disappearing after you exit an interior. Invisible clouds may still occur at load, and the mod will try to force the fix once to push the clouds to appear in a nonintrusive way. 
• PipBoy light changes - Changes the brightness of the PipBoy light based on if you're in interiors or its day/night.
  

3. Darker Nights

Nights are darker but should be playable. the goal is to look like actual nights. As a rule I will not be creating alternate brightness levels so what you see is what you get, but hopefully I have found a nice happy medium here and you can adjust ReShade or NVR settings as needed. Some nights are a bit darker than others, DLC and Horror themed weather's were made slightly darker to make them feel right in my opinion. 

4. New Vegas Reloaded

Prob the most underrated and biggest part of the mod. New Vegas reloaded is criminally underrated. It hooks directly into the games engine so performance overhead is 0, and this makes it far superior to ENB in many ways. The preset makes use of many of NVR's effects


• Ambient Occlusion
• Depth of field
• Color enhancement
• Water Shaders
• Sharpening
• GodRays
• Bloom
  

5. Reshade

Most people are familiar with Reshade. This is where the final color correction and balancing of contrast, white black point values etc. takes place. Performance overhead is minimal to 0 depending on your rig. Even a potato should be able to run this though. 

• HDR enhancement
• Color and tone enhancements
• Highlight and shadow enhancements
• Sharpening
  

6. Enhanced Clouds and Stars

Many of the enhanced weathers use repurposed vanilla cloud textures that were unused in the vanilla game, or were adjusted to better fit the new weather changes. In addition, thanks to the kind generosity of wonderful mod authors like Marcurios, Yossarian22 and HardLeather I have been able to include enhanced cloud and night sky textures, which has allowed me to truly create an homage to some of my favorite vibes from those mods. 



7. Requirements

REQUIRES - New Vegas Reloaded. This preset was built for New Vegas Reloaded 1.3. you can prob use whichever version you like but newer versions seem to have a bunch of lighting glitches and bugs so I would avoid them until those are ironed out

https://www.tesreloaded.com/t14-package#:~:text=New%20Vegas%20Reloaded%20is%20a,that%20no%20longer%20make%20sense.

REQUIRES - Reshade - Download Reshade and install all modules when prompted.

https://reshade.me/

REQUIRES - NVSE 
REQUIRES - JIP

Recommended - NMC texture Pack. - Any texture pack may look fine but the colors are tuned for NMC and textures play a big role in the games overall look and feel.

https://www.nexusmods.com/newvegas/mods/43135

Recommended - Millenia's environmental map shaders - This will make weapons and surfaces properly shine in the light

https://www.nexusmods.com/newvegas/mods/69135/

Installation

Install NVR 1.3(other versions will work but have visual bugs and glitches related to lighting)
Install Reshade - Make sure to install to the game folder
Install My mod - using a Mod manager is highly recommended - this should overwrite the NVR shaders and Ini

Set the following settings in your INI file under the Weather section

[Weather]
fSunGlareSize=300.0000
fSunBaseSize=300.0000
bPrecipitation=1
fAlphaReduce=1.0000
SBumpFadeColor=255,255,255,255
SLerpCloseColor=255,255,255,255
SEnvReduceColor=255,255,255,255

After starting the game, follow the tutorial for Reshade if needed. Press the home key and Choose the "HDR Color and Weather.ini" preset located in the Data folder (not the one in the config folder, that is for the ESP options). 

NOTE IF YOU DO NOT CHOOSE THE PROPER RESHADE PRESET IT WILL NOT LOOK THE SAME AS MY SCREENSHOTS

Uninstallation 

Set all INI values to 0
start up the game. All settings will reset.
Save the game
Uninstall

BIG thank you to the following mod authors, this mod is inspired by, relies upon and owes a debt of gratitude to you guys

Marcurios
Yossarian22  
HardLeather
jazzisparis
Alenet
Reshade Team