I've been trying to wrap my mind around how Esenthel uses HDR for a while now but rather than just fumbling about, I decided to go ahead and post the question and see if any pros were willing to offer some insight.

HDR (High Dynamic Range) as I understand in how it works within a gaming environment seeks to mimic the expansion and contraction of the human eyes iris. In Hero Engine, HDR comes into play in the following form: When you're in a cave looking out, everything outside the cave is extremely bright, however when you move outside the cave, the lighting gradually dims down to a normalized state and when you (standing outside now) look into the cave, the interior of the cave is extremely dark.

This is congruent with what I understand about how HDR should work.

I however am having no luck approximating this behavior in the "HDR" section of the environment options and my guess is I'm just doing it wrong. I can't get any "real time" shifting of light and dark based on location going on and in fact, regardless of the settings i use, i end up with nothing more than a really complicated way of raising the brightness or darkness of the entire world, which isn't what we want.

Anyone able to shed some light on the settings and how they relate to implementing real HDR in Esenthel?

Hi,

In order to enable HDR in EE you must enable the checkbox in environment options, and allow it in Video Options (HDR).

After you do both of this things, it should work automatically. (try using default environment options first).

/blink

"I however am having no luck approximating this behavior in the "HDR" section of the environment options and my guess is I'm just doing it wrong."

Obviously, I've already been doing that.

I'd like to know in plain English what each setting does; what it's responsible for. "Max Bright" and "Max Dark" don't really explain anything.

"max bright / max dark" means how much to allow the engine to scale the brightness (brighten or darken it)

do you mean you're not seeing any effect at all?

try:
exit editor
delete environment setting file (to force default values)
start editor
enable HDR in Environment AND in Video Options (2 elements)

I have tested this and it works

(12-12-2011 09:56 PM)Esenthel Wrote:  "max bright / max dark" means how much to allow the engine to scale the brightness (brighten or darken it)

do you mean you're not seeing any effect at all?

try:
exit editor
delete environment setting file (to force default values)
start editor
enable HDR in Environment AND in Video Options (2 elements)

I have tested this and it works

I mean I don't understand fundamentally how Esenthel uses HDR because i'm saying it isn't anything like the HDR I knew from other engines = There's no dynamic changing of light and dark when you go from (for instance) an interior area to an exterior area.

There's a "time" setting, so I have to assume that real-time lighting changes do in-fact happen, or at least they're supposed to be happening.

Do you have any videos so far of esenthel where these changes are taking place? Because I haven't seen it happen in any of the videos either.

Maybe you just don't notice the effect?

make ground of dark material, and rotate camera from sky to ground and back:

you will notice that after few seconds the brightness adjusts

I can't read the values in your hdr settings. Could you upload an image of higher resolution or perhaps just that window?

they are at the default settings - exit editor, delete editor.environment.txt settings, start editor