Re:Games Look Bad: HDR and Tone Mapping
by tripzilch on Saturday October 28, 2017 @06:46AM
(#15574675)
Good thing in real life there's no such thing as truly zero photons, then (which is a detail the article actually shortly touches upon).
Also, if that type of "wonky" throws off your rendering pipeline, you're bound to get something else wrong.
Such as ever having a linear scale with a small number of bits in your pipeline. The linear scaled brightness stays afloat all the way through (cause floats have this handy feature of being transparently sorta-logarithmic in the way they use their bits, even 16-bit floats beat 20-bit ints for that purpose), only at the very end you apply the tonemap+gamma function(s), then dither, then truncate to fixed (8) bit integer.
Also, if that type of "wonky" throws off your rendering pipeline, you're bound to get something else wrong.
Such as ever having a linear scale with a small number of bits in your pipeline. The linear scaled brightness stays afloat all the way through (cause floats have this handy feature of being transparently sorta-logarithmic in the way they use their bits, even 16-bit floats beat 20-bit ints for that purpose), only at the very end you apply the tonemap+gamma function(s), then dither, then truncate to fixed (8) bit integer.