True HDR light mapping with adaptive tone mapping
I finished my implementation of a true 64 bit HDR rendering pipeline. Interesting is that Q3Map2 works with HDR values internally. So I changed the map compiler XMap2 to save lightmaps, the light grid and all other light related information in a new XBSP format without the ugly colour normalization that Q3Map2 usually does when it saves the lightmaps as .tga files. Finally I can have lights that are really bright and the camera uses an adaptive tone mapping algorithm that adjusts the scene exposure automatically based on the average scene luminance. I tested really many different global tone mapping operators and the simple exponential tone mapping operator seems to be the best working one for our project.
For a comparison how the camera adjusts dynamically the image result:
And after looking a bit into the very bright sky:
If you would like to know more about this technique then I recommend that you have a look at the HDRLighting Sample from the DirectX SDK.
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wow you did some great work on this. thanks for sharing this.
wow you did some great work on this. thanks for sharing this.
wow you did some great work on this. thanks for sharing this.