Hard Light Productions Forums
Modding, Mission Design, and Coding => FS2 Open Coding - The Source Code Project (SCP) => Topic started by: FreeSpaceFreak on December 25, 2015, 06:06:22 am
-
This came out of a discussion on Scroll internal, we decided it might be worthwhile opening a thread here...
Postprocessing, and especially the bloom effect, does not always combine very well with background nebulae/planets, especially those that were not made with postpro in mind (i.e. basically all existing background assets). It can significantly change the perceived colour intensity, and it strongly washes out the brighter parts, as illustrated in this image from The Dagger:
(http://i1169.photobucket.com/albums/r503/Dagguerreotype/screen0610_zpstafjokfs.png)
As a practical illustration, this background was designed to look quite moody and atmospheric:
(http://i.imgur.com/LKefV1V.jpg)
With -post_process enabled, the bright edge of the planet is completely washed out, and the colours look intense and saturated, completely altering the atmosphere of the setting:
(http://i.imgur.com/u4BoDaH.jpg)
How feasible/desirable would it be to do something about this? Ideally (IMHO) bloom would not be applied to the background, or at least very much reduced, but I know very little about rendering code :nervous:
-
Post Processing, by definition really can't be limited to certain objects. It's "post" everything else. It takes to final rendered image and applies the desired effect.
I suppose it could be possible for the code to do some sort of matte process to in a way limit the effect to certain objects. (I do this sort of thing in video post production often.) But for a game setting, that's neither efficient nor will it look very good without the manual tweaks and edits per frame that video production artists would give. Perhaps Swifty might know some technique i'm not familiar with, but I'm pretty confident in saying that post production, by definition, cannot be applied to everything but the background.
That said, wxLauncher supports "Mod recommended lighting settings" in the mod.ini. We could make sure that also includes the bloom setting and Scroll could be sure to include one of those for the "definitive Scroll experience".
-
There are ways in which we could do our rendering pipeline so that background objects are excluded from post processing, but doing so is not high on our list of priorities right now.
-
How would that work, though? Bloom, is an effect that spills over the background whether it's applied there or not. So you still need a way to make sure you are adding the bloom to the background pixels properly. At least, I would think so. But hey, I'm not a coder, so now I'm just talking out of my ass and assuming it's similar to the way I would do bloom in video production.
-
There's a bunch of trickery involved in this, which is why I am not sure when we are able to implement this, but in general, this is quite possible.