HDR lighting,over exposure,bloom whatever its called.

Talk among developers, and propose and discuss general development planning/tackling/etc... feature in this forum.
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Spiner
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HDR lighting,over exposure,bloom whatever its called.

Post by Spiner »

Any plans on having it in the game? Fantastic lighting effect. Could make great suns,flare reflections,lasers,sheild glows,afterburner/engine effects.etc

This was a explination I got about how it works just incase you don't knwo what Im talking about.

The effect is very simple. First, draw the frame into a texture.
Do some stuff* (explanation later, but generally, darken it)
Then, blur the texture some.
After that, draw the frame again into the backbuffer, and add your darkened, blurred texture to it.

And there is this http://www.gamedev.net/reference/articl ... le2108.asp

Me not being a coder I don't know how hard it is. Just asking.
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Post by Halleck »

Yes, that would be an awesome addition to the engine. Hurleybird posted this link a little bit ago: http://www.daionet.gr.jp/~masa/rthdribl/#Shots.

If that code is available under the GPL (I didn't see any liscensing info) than I'd imagine it could be incorporated without much difficulty. If not (and it had to be written from scratch) it all depends on if the dev team has the time and the inclination.

It would make VS look so damn cool that I'm willing to bet they'll implement it if they have the time. Also, I think that would make VS the first game to use realtime HDR effects. How awesome would that be?
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Post by hurleybird »

I am an advocate of HDR lighting. In the right enviroment the effect can be amazing. I havent yet seen HDR in a space enviroment, but I have the feeling that it would greatly complement it. In space you would imagine that there would be a huge contrast between the pitch black of the void and the brillant light of the sun, or beams and engines for that matter. HDR lighting helps make this contrast visible and leads to very realistic lighting. Using HDR if you were actually to a sun it would appear very bright, and would make other objects hard to discern

Using HDR intense light will bleed into objects. For example, while watching a ship against the backdrop of a sun the light from the sun would bleed into the ship. HDR can make realistic sunsets, elipses, and other phenomena found in space.

As well, HDR can be very cool for backgrounds, making light from those backgrounds more or less intense depending on who or what is between you and the background.

I have seen HDR lighting in two games so far. Half Life 2, and in Farcry 1.3

In Half Life 2, I beleive that HDR is only enabled on Radeon 9xxx, Radeon x series, and Geforce 6 series (I beleive that Geforce FX is capable of doing the HDR, but it is disabled for performance reasons.) In Half Life 2 the HDR is a nice touch, but not very noticable, and it doesent effect perfmance all two much.

In Farcry though, HDR is a completley different beast. It is used everywhere, and effects everything. It is lightyears ahead of the HDR used in Half Life 2. It makes a huge difference to the graphics of the game, and is probably the most impressive graphical feature in Farcry. The downside is that it eats up performance like a pig in an already demanding engine. There is a bug which screws up the game if anti-ailising is also used. As well, Farcry's HDR ONLY works with Geforce 6 class hardware.

The HDR rendering technique used in farcry is called openEXR HDR. This is the technique used by lucasfilms and industrial light and magic, and is supported by newer nvidia hardware, not sure about ATI though. Make no mistake, this is very, very impressive stuff...

...and you can download the source too! Everything you need to know about implementing openEXR into an application is available on the website

I would very much like to see HDR rendering in vegastrike. Having a 6800 Ultra I would of course like to see openEXR HDR supports, but I would be very happy of another form as well. The best of both worlds would be to have support for regular and openEXR (for those of us lucky enough to support it) high dynamic range rendering.
Last edited by hurleybird on Sun Feb 06, 2005 10:29 pm, edited 5 times in total.
hurleybird
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Post by hurleybird »

Halleck wrote:Also, I think that would make VS the first game to use realtime HDR effects. How awesome would that be?
Well, it would be the first space based game to have HDR effects (I think). There are a couple FPS'es with HDR rendering, but I think that it would have a far greater affect in a space based enviroment (as I mentioned earlier) due to its contrasting nature.
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Post by Halleck »

hurleybird wrote:Well, it would be the first space based game to have HDR effects (I think). There are a couple FPS'es with HDR rendering, but I think that it would have a far greater affect in a space based enviroment (as I mentioned earlier) due to its contrasting nature.
Oh really? Which FPS'es?
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Post by hurleybird »

I said in my previous post actually. Half Life 2, and Farcry with the 1.3 patch.

EDIT: I was actually wrong about HDR in Half Life 2. While HDR was demoed earlier in Half life 2's development (which is what led me to beleive it had HDR) it is not supported by the engine yet. Valve does have plans to add HDR support to the source engine though....

...Which effectivley makes my previous comparision of Farcry vs. Half Life 2's HDR worthless. Though IMO the HDR I've seen in Farcry still looks better than the HDR demoed by Valve.
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Post by Spiner »

Actaully alot of games use the bloom effect. Knights of the old republic,prince of persia SoT and WW, Splinter Cell,MGS3,Mercenaries,SW:B,halo 2,ST:BC.

Course those are older versions of the effect. I hear Pixel Shader 3.0 does the effect exatcly how it should be done. So the far cry with 1.3 patch(I believe thats the patch that ads ps3.0 support) would have the effect as it was meant to be.
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Post by hurleybird »

Yeah.. the "bloom" effect is poor the poor mans HDR compared to the stuff in farcry
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Post by Guest »

For the sake of compatability and speed I would go for a bloom filter thats configurable in the config file. Why? Well -=real=- HDR is a system hog, even with a top of the line graphics card. I've heard of people dropping to half the frame rate in FarCry with it enabled. On the other hand I've seen a simple bloom filter done on Quake II and Quake engines as well as some custom opensource stuff with almost now or like 2fps loss and also as Hurly said in HL2 and find it to be a good match. However there is a screensaver program(Can't remember the name now) that is basically a render engine with all kinds of great effects. There is also this http://opengl.nutty.org/effects/index.html/ which has the source code included, though I think it's a bit too high on the glare. What really needs to be done is an incorporation with the already excellent per-pixel lighting present. This would give great model shading and also correct color bleeding. If I can get the cvs code to compile, maybe I'll give it a try. It's gonna have to wait a week or so until I get my new HD though as this one is slowly getting more and more bad sectors.

--f1gm3nt3d
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Post by hellcatv »

ya...well actually adding shaders to the game isn't terribly hard... honestly it would require changing mesh_gfx just a bit...simplifying it to take out the whole "sort by texture" bit and just make everything sort-by-distance
and taking out the passes
making everything draw in one pass with the current shader and current textures

and voilla... that would be a great first step from a serious coder
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