In my last game, we simply gave the artists a minimum and maximum value that would be applied to the "average scene luminance" step.
e.g. the artists might say min=0.5, max=10, and then if the average is calculated to be 0.1, it will be increased to 0.5.
We found this to be a simple way to stop the auto-exposure making every different scene look the same.
That is hard for me to understand. Sorry, this is our first game so the industries terminology is lost upon me! can you explain a bit further of what that means?
In your tonemapping shader, you've got something like:float avgLum = tex2D( ... );You can put limits on it by adding something like:avgLum = min( 10.0, max( 0.5, avgLum ) );This will constraint how much the tone-mapper can adjust for very bright or very dark scenes.
[edit] Though instead of hard-coding those numbers, you can make them variables that are controlled by a slider, and have your artists choose suitable values.
In our game, we used different values for day-time, night-time, raining, etc...
In your tonemapping shader, you've got something like:float avgLum = tex2D( ... );You can put limits on it by adding something like:avgLum = min( 10.0, max( 0.5, avgLum ) );This will constraint how much the tone-mapper can adjust for very bright or very dark scenes.
Oh, i thought you said you limited the artist. my bad!
Well, i want to say thank you to everybody for this. We have finished the system and it looks pretty good. Still working on some lighting changes and some texture work to compensate for the new system but overall a great look. Thank you to everybody.
