Tonemapping and HDR ( not as simple as you might think )

Original game with only bloom enabled!

If you have been following you would notice that we have had several screenshots of our game previously. None of them were bad and none of them were lacking, but we figured if we could add in some extra systems to add to the... "style" we would. I asked our coders to sit down and make an HDR + Tonemaping for our game and in doing so we came out with this!



As you can tell the HDR was doing some serious washing of the colors so we needed to add in some tone balancing as well as auto correcting exposure settings. Doing that resulted in:



At this point we were at a loss of what to do, so we went to the mighty forums and posted our progress. With the help of some very dedicated members we were able to tame the problem and move forward. The results were rather appealing but still need some form of control to get it correct:



All in all we are very pleased with this result. Some tweaking of the colors and the lighting will need to be done but we have come up with a very nice feel. Our next project will be to work in color correction to set the mood for those night time scenes and the weather/rainy days.

We have made controls that let you manage all of these settings while in game, so you can see and tweak every option. This system is very complex and really has allowed for some nice features that we hope to make available to all the modding tools that we will produce for the game. If you have any suggestions or know of ways that we could do this better let us know! Thanks in advance.