Bloom effect

Is it normal you have just one car and one track in devmode?

And I can''t seem to find a setting for bloom?

 

Bloom should not affect whole screen as shown in this Tuttle's animated picture. Bloom is intended to highlight areas emitting/reflecting realy log of light. So expected places are, sun reflections on car livery (sun reflection), car lights when lit. but not whole scene.

 

100% agree.

The problem is that the Bloom is after the HDR effect chain...so it's affected by the White Point as already said yesterday...and to avoid post atomic results you've to turn down the WP level...but this introduce a lot of open overexposed white in the scene...

BTW, actually the bloom effect has no effect on car reflections. You can see this in the Dallara nose in my shots (there is the sun above the fence).

 

IMO bloom is calculated yet in floating point domain. So you may have places 1000 times brighter then others (light sources, or sun reflections). Blooming would affect only such energy areas without touching others. After all HDR will normalize scene lighting making possible to fit it into finite range of colours for output device.

So, the point is to allow some light sources or reflections to have very high energy comparing to the rest of scene. My guess is that currently light sources or reflected light energy are close to the rest of a scene, just to work correctly without HDR.

 

Yeah.

Actually Bloom punch on full whites...so you get shiny glowed spots for every white surface (tires brands...white paints...white logos etc.). I don't know how they can force the effect to works just on high energy light source as light emitters or specular reflectors...but I hope the bloom will work just for High Energy stuff...the sun and the specular reflectors (and light sources in general).

EG: in Dunsfold I've a big area with hundreds of solar panels. I would love to see nice flares above it..

 

Tuttle: Thanks a lot for comprehensive explanation!

 

U're welcome..

 

Yeah, I agree with this as well. Bloom replicates lens imperfections (i.e. our cornea and lens or a camera's lens). HDR is trying to replicate the response curve of a 'sensor' (whether it be our cones/rods, a digital sensor, or film). Obviously, the light travels through the lens, diffracts (i.e. bloom) then hits the sensor and its response curve is 'calculated'.

 

Hey, i am normally just lurking around the dev areas to keep in touch with the latest developments since i have no skills whatsoever in modding - but it is great fun to learn things by getting really good explanations like tuttle does.
Two thumps up for that and a big thank you for spending that kind of effort!

 

Actually, no. In LDR mode, the scene lighting and sky are tonemapped, so the scene is lit with clamped lighting. In HDR mode, the scene lighting is unclamped. So in HDR, bloom with very high luminance values is added post-tonemapping to get some heat back into the scene.

 

I was rather hoping we could have bloom on the specular highlights of car models and objects including a powerful sun glint I always see on bright days.

I'm less interested in the environment bloom to be honest, it's rather old hat.

 

Bloom implementations may vary, but what's also very important is what's actually rendered by game engine.
Bloom doesn't really need to emulate something physical - it may be just a way to "express" very bright colors that our monitors are unable to display.


When you think of it - Sun is one insanely bright spot on the sky. And when reflected in something it will be one damn bright spot aswell. You can do a bloom filter without any thresholds or parameters and get good results if game engine will render that kind of brightness.

Just to give you an idea - average clear sky can have a luminance of more less 8000 cd/m2 while solar disk can be around 1.6 * 10^9 cd/m2. In other words, Sun is a small spot on the sky that's 200000 times brighter than the sky.
But while being so incredibly bright, it also has very small angular size (meaning it appears small to us).

It will be the same with sun reflected in car body - it will be insanely bright, but also very small spot - often much smaller than one pixel on screen.

Bloom implementations usually have some thresholds to aviod entire scene getting blurry. The reason for it is that game engines usually don't give justice to Sun nor specular reflections - they're white or just above and wouldn't produce bloom if you didn't make bloom effect stronger, but that causes all objects to produce some bloom and therefore game developers fix it with threshold.

But you can also make bloom effect without any threshold - just very weak so you can't notice it in the scene. But then, when something gets very bright it will produce bloom. This is more less what I did in one of my projects a few years back:

This bloom filter has no threshold, but image is still perfectly sharp because bloom is weak - only specular reflections are very strong.
It wasn't really HDR, because it had no tone mapping nor dynamic exposure - this was my first postprocessing made in high range though

And here's another example - this time with cars (don't mind yellow color of specular reflections - I was just experimenting and liked this color ) - again sharp scene with blur only where something bright is reflected and again no thresholds in bloom implementation:

Yep, that's pretty much what I prefer also - sharp scene with no blurrines. I don't drive drunk in reality and I don't want to feel drunk in a game, but using bloom to express something very bright is very welcome

 

I'm not a fan of bloom so I'm hoping that most modders use very small amounts, if any at all.

 

I was wondering when that comic would make an appearance...

 

That's why I'm afraid anout HDR and bloom settable for each track separately. There is too much room for "artistic view" of track creator, instead to be as realistic as possible and same for all tracks. For sure there will be authors who like more bloom, and less bloom. In result any great track may be burst up.

Again, I think HDR and bloom should be fixed for whole game. But of course once released it must be perfect/trustworthy

 

No offence...but modders are working for free and spending a lot of times and energy to give you free stuff to enjoy. So let them the freedom to think about what they want and what they like...and yes they're free to have an "artistic view", using their own personal style... after this if you don't like it you've just to unload the "author track look"...or turn off the HDR at all.

We can have the "standard/locked" look and the "author" look...letting people the final choice.

Honestly I like this!

PS: I was choking for the comics...LOL!!!

 

Maybe not fixed, but user controllable instead of artist controllable.

 

I believe that's why there's that "Load HDR Profile" thing in the Configure menu--so users can use their own .hdp's to override the track ones. That is still in there, right? I don't have the game in front of me...

 

Yes it is. Is exactly the stuff I was talking about in the post above...