High Dynamic Range Discussion (moon-landing conspiracy people allowed)

There is a lot going round with High Dynamic Range (HDR) in TV's and photographs apps (apparently) https://www.techradar.com/news/tele...-next-big-shift-in-home-entertainment-1280990

But waaaaay back in 2005 Valve was the first to punch out a workable HDR solution to the Source engine render.

In short and putting it very simply....
  1. Dynamic contrast
  2. Bloom.
  3. A tonne of math and Rule-sets to adjust the values of those two and what entities on the screen count/not count.
The game camera would react like an iris in the human eye/camera, The idea that you could be in a dark room and could "see" the walls/textures/environment (iris is wide open letting in maximum light), but the environment outside the window is blinding white with light blooming effect ( and lens-flare if you like that sort of thing).

As you go outside, your eyes adjust to the light, the pupils(iris) become smaller, letting in "less" light.
In-game, the dynamic contrast kicks in, and the white-washed vista before us tones down into being "visible", however, that darkened room that you could see clearly previously, is now pitch-black with no discernable details.

This led to some interesting discussions about the competitive play, and pros/cons of using the effect to your advantage and/or, people turning it on/off on their client-side.

But do we still need this? Well moving into Ray-tracing, HDR, is still an active and vital part. Yes, light bounces are being calculated, but that only informs the "handwavium" of lighting techniques we use already today. In quake2 RTX, you can turn on/off the bloom, and it just shatters the dynamic contrasting which I guess is steered by the Ray-tracing calculations.
It looks "right" when it all works together even the god-rays from the sun, which are still screen-spaced, and not calculated volumes. (unlike what we are seeing in odyssey, seriously, turn your back to the light source, and you see shadows cutting holes in the dusty light-volumes, (when used).

High-Dynamic range has been a part of Elite Dangerous and Horizons.
Being close to the star, bleeds everything into being silhouettes, and the nebulae in the background aren't visible.
Fly away from the star, and the skymap becomes more visible.
Now there has been a swinging pendulum around the "dark-side" of planets of just how much "ambient" light should light them up and/or how pitch black they should be, especially when you don't have an atmosphere to scatter light around.

Now valve, had issues with their HDR ruleset, it worked well for lost-coast, and day of defeat, it needed some fixes for Episode 1, but episode 2 needed lots of fixes to the rule-set govenering the bloom and dynamic contrasting. Flashing lights of the cars indicators, or energy beams would add undulating values to the calculations making the final image go all whacko.

Odyssey now has updated the HDR rule-set.
Drive round in an SRV on the dark-side of the planet and you need your headlights and night vision.
Jump out on foot and run around with your touch on, and you can't see very far.
TURN OFF the torch and suddenly, you can start seeing the geometry again from the ambient lighting.

Hazard a speculative-wild-guess,
Either the rule-sets are different for the on-foot vs vehicles
or the Cockpit lights / HUD are too bright for the HDR calculations to lower the contrast down to see the geometry that is lit by ambient light.

Also, Space is weird when it comes to discerning "correct" lighting.
The tin-foil hat moon landings were faked due because of the photographic evidence not adhering to normal atmospheric diffused "earth" lighting.
We instead get "overly strong" main light sources, that destroy any diffused ambient lighting.
Where-as 2-3rd bounced ambient lighting was almost as strong as the primary source (thanks to the lunar regolith high albedo (reflective) values).

Something we "earth people" don't have much experience of.

The Discussion is the rule-set of the High-Dynamic Ranges?
  • Physically accurate regardless of unnatural artifacts that would generate (like the moon landing or any footage from the ISS where you just see a black background and no-stars and blinding white space-craft)?
  • Artistically accurate (feels right, even though it's not, like scaly dinosaurs),
  • Darkening of the cockpit glass due to it being part augmented reality screen (which when the canopy is destroyed gives you a different set of visuals).
  • Accurate for gameplay (and for who's gameplay)
Do we want to account for cockpit lighting? do we want to turn the cockpit lights and hud off?
Do we want ambient light dark-sides of planets, even though that would ruin the ambient lighting from the atmospheric scatter?
Do we want to have blow out strong Sun-lighting? or not?
 
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