Understanding HL2: Lost Coast and HDR Lighting

I just busted out Photoshop and opened the normal exposure images and easily recreated the same affects as HDR shown on that page by adjusting the levels, brightness, and contrast.

So let me get this straight. Basically HDR is adjusting brightness, contrast, and levels in real time on a 3D application? Am I wrong or is there more to it than this?

personally I find this kind of HDR massively underwhelming. We've had blown-out textures in mafia, and glowy bits in splinter cell.

The only interesting stuff would be using HDR environment captures to light a scene (like in that oft-reposted thread of the HL2 characters in real life).

Personally I'll continue my one-man campaign for well-implemented motion blur.

Some of these effects seem stupid because arent you looking thru someones eyes in a game? Lens Flare and HDR are things that happen because a camera cant capture or record something. There is not lens flare or as much "blow out" in our eyesight. Now soft lighting and shadowing seems right, as bright sunlight seems softer and shadows have blurred edges. Most people have some vision problems that make things even less sharp. So should we assume because we play games looking at a screen that what we see should be as if we are using a camera? I dont get it.

Mandarin Chinese is taught to Australian school kids at a younger and younger age each year in the belief it will be an indispensible tool for them when they grow up.

What? I was never taught that, and I dont know anyone who was!

Re those Far Cry shots: I understand the technolgy is neat and all, but that is some seriously over-exaggerated lighting. As far as 'immersion in the world' goes, I almost prefer all of those other shots in the 'before' mode.

This one in particular seems ridiculous to me:
http://gotfrags.net/images/hdr/hdr7.jpg

Hello glowing bulletin board.

Please explain to me why this is called HDR rendering. It seems it should be called Low Dynamic Range Rendering.

In reply.

Wow, those Far Cry vids looked terrible.

In regard to those supposed HDR shots using RL situations, theyre not.
They were made using several layering techniques with an image editor, ala Photoshop and others. They cannot be recreated by ANY gaming hardware or software (yet). Anyone with a Pentium 266, Voodoo 3 and 64MB SIMM RAM could also recreate these very shots. Even the creator of these pics acknowledges and LOL at people who think these are indicative of anything regarding HL2. Anyone with the photo manipulating knowhow could do the same with old games like Super Mario Brothers and make it look as spectacular.
Its just a bunch of overedited photos. Nothing more.

HDR lighting is so overhyped it's ridiculous. What graphiics feature will be next to sell video cards? Spherical harmonic lighting? Subsurface scattering? what sounds cool?

Needs more lense flare...

Ok, that introduction is amongst the worst writing I've ever seen.

WINDOWS XP: how do you enable the Security Tab in Windows Explorer?
I alway forget, I want to grant some rights to users to folders/drives and when I right click on the folder, the security tab is not there...

wait...isnt this the same effect used in PSP wipeout? well, it sounds similar, and as of this writing I have no clue why it slows down your uber gaming rig to a crawl. I'm having a hard time seperating HDR from a nice bloom effect when exiting a tunnel, I suppose.

What kind of monster machine do I need to run this?

I do have the latest FarCry patch installed and have been playing.

I also got a new video card, and I wasn't sure if it looked so much better because of the new video card (run at higher settings) or this HD lighting stuff was kicking in (or do you have to manually turn that ON in FarCry?)

Am I mistaken, but isn't HDR just what Carmack has been preaching since year 2000:
http://www.bluesnews.com/cgi-bin/finger.pl?id=1&time=20000429013039
He already got problems with limited color ranges with Quake3, so this should be a necessary evolution in graphics.

Meh...is there anything ATI can do that Nvidia can't? I'm just curious...

Here's a nice addition to this news thread:

NVIDIA demo competiton video:
http://www-i8.informatik.rwth-aachen.de/teaching/cg1/competition_data/demo_volker_schoenefeld.avi (23.9MB, XviD)

Precomputed global illumination
Spherical Harmonics approx. of BRDF
HDR (Tone Mapping) (Automatic exposure adaption etc.)
Water simulation (Fresnel/Refraction)

From: http://www-i8.informatik.rwth-aachen.de/teaching/cg1/competition.html

HDR sounds interesting. But I wonder if its "too much" realism? Do I really want to have to squint at my monitor to try and see past the oversaturation (can I even see past it by squinting?)

If someone's interested in the work of the guy who INVENTED the HDR, here's the link, with some very impressive videos:
http://www.debevec.org/

It amazes me how this technology is somewhat "old", but just now it is showing on VGA cards, as it is very processor-intensive.

Good read! :D

There are two basic phases to HDR rendering. The first phase calculates how much light energy is entering the eye through any given pixel. This is the "high dynamic range" part. This is done like normal rendering has been done in games for ages, except that it is in linear light space rather than gamma space.

The second phase maps the high dynamic range of values from the first phase into the low dynamic range of your monitor. This is known as tone mapping. There are different tone mapping algorithms you can apply. Going from one tone mapping algorithm to another is an operation that changes one set of colors into another set, which is what you can do with the color editing features of Photoshop. That is why you were able to achieve largely the same effect starting from an already tone-mapped image. Using HDR will be higher quality than transforming between tone-mapped images in photoshop though, since starting from a HDR source you'll get fewer quantization artifacts (aka banding).

SO i guess this this is coming SOON?

In the HL2 model thread the guy mentions a 6 second AVI of one of the HL2 creature walking through his backyard but he never posts a link (that I found). THAT would be cool.
http://forums.facepunchstudios.com/showthread.php?t=21286&page=32&pp=20

that oversaturation is one example of what is possible with HDR...


ICO'd.

I believe the important thing here is that HL2 and its expansion will run on my GeForce 4, whereas BF2 will not.

wow, you even linked the fan made far cry hdr page. damn good news post, alec! *thumb up*

Wow, they didnt even use ATI to show this at E3. - it was shown on dual 6800s at E3. Interesting.

This is old but I'm fairly certain it uses HDR. I point this out because alot of people in other forums have been going blah blah blah about how only Nvidia can do HDR. Well BS because I can run this demo in realtime on an x850 and it looks awesome. its a shame FarCry never got patched to let Ati users make use of all these cool features. anyways, more eye candy if you missed it way back in the day.

http://www.ati.com/gitg/promotions/crytek/index.html

I just noticed the other day that Forza Motorsport does this to some degree going in and out of tunnels. I think they cheat a bit because it looks like the whole scene is affected by the effect (almost like a quick gamma adjustment), but it's a nice touch.

Some bits about HDR there, too.

http://www.unrealtechnology.com/html/technology/ue30.shtml


And the HL2 shots were also posted here...

http://forums.facepunchstudios.com/showthread.php?t=21286&page=1&pp=20