Re:Games Look Bad: HDR and Tone Mapping
by pfranz on Wednesday October 25, 2017 @05:41PM
(#15554533)
I still don't see why animating the exposure explains why there's "bad HDR" in games (high contrast and over saturation)? I haven't implemented it or read any papers on the subject, but the games I've played don't look that much different than auto-exposure on camcorders in the 90's (or your phone today). For actual cameras it's more difficult because you need to guess and adjust the aperture or shutter instead of having a HDR image in a buffer and deciding how to generate a LDR image to present. Calculating the exposure (especially if you're animating it and only willing to go so far in one direction or the other), should be fairly quick.
A typically developed HDR photo is a single sample following the time at which the eye has adapted. There are [hopefully] no over- or under-exposed areas.
The dynamic range in HDR games is often used to simulate the entire process of eye adaptation. It's a function over time that intentionally creates over- or under-exposure some of the time.