HDR-Rendering found it's way into [w]tech!
Before I start with simply showing some screenshots, let me explain what HDR-Rendering is:
What is HDR?
The HDR-Effect is a combination of ToneMapping and Bloom. You may know what Bloom is: It's that nice glow effect almost all games are using today. But ToneMapping isn't very known in the non-developer reigns.
What is ToneMapping?
ToneMapping simulates the following situations:
If you look into a bright light, your eyes will get used to the bright light and the rest will become darker. If you are in a dark room, or walking around at night, your Eyes will get used to the dark, you will see everything brighter. (I won't go into technical details here, as there are enough articles explaining that out there)
On the first picture the bright red square is filling up a lot of space on the screen, which tells our ToneMapper to make the rendered image darker, while it has to adjust the second image the other way around, since the square is smaller and it is not as bright as the first one.
It's either a cool effect, and also makes life for mappers easier. They don't have to make different content for dark and bright places for example.
Is there more ToneMapping can be used to?
Yes, we can apply it to the Bloom, giving it a nice taint.
Final results/Comparison
Here you can see the difference of the same scene with HDR turned on and HDR turned off.
It is much better when you are able to move around in the world by yourself, though.
![HDR found its way into [w]tech](https://media.moddb.com/cache/images/engines/1/1/146/thumb_620x2000/HDR_OFF_ON.jpg)
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HDR is great and your implementation looks fine, but remember: overdoing it makes everything look stupid instead of better. ;)
The problem is finding the sweet spot that MOST people agree on, since everyone has a very different idea of what is under and overuse of HDR Rendering.
Looks great though!
HDRR is NOT bloom. HDRR itself allows for dealing with a large intensity range. The look is defined by the tone-mapper added to it. A good tone mapper yields though the same image of a full lit low-res image as it does with a low-res renderer. Special effects are possible but the only good tone-mappers I've seen so far are those which are nearly not noticeable (then they work good). Bloom on the other hand is a HDR/LDR independent effect and is greatly overdone. So HDRR is good but excessive bloom is not (which unfortunately a lot of games do). Please don't equal HDRR with Bloom, it's entirely different and one does not depend on the other.
I don't like that overused blooming in games either.
We'll try to keep it low, but nice, even thought it looks just too cool sometimes. ;)
@Bloom != HDR: I use the ToneMapping operator on our bloom as well. It wouldn't look like that without ToneMapping.
I often turn HDR off in-games...it's blinding in pretty much every game I've seen implement it.
There are many different parameters in the world settings to adjust the current post processing, you can even deactivate it. Later we will build in something like a post processing chain or node editor.
So don't worry about blinding and similar, it's still under control of the artist;)
Looking good, i always like reading these posts about the graphics tech as i want to do more graphics programming as i mostly do gameplay programming.