The reason why it doesn’t look right in the Hellion picture is that those engines, by themselves, don’t look particularly bright. It’s probably because how exactly bloom looks like depends on what is taking the picture, as well as the eventual materials before it. Here, there was some pane of glass involved, but no eyeball. Also, I wonder if we don’t expect very intense lights to be more white than that - though it may simply be how my brain is trying to translate ‘too much light’ in a colour.
After burning my eyes staring at headlights and filament bulb, then fiddling with Gimp, my eyeball’s bloom can be vaguely approximated by using the Supernova filter (an exact representation is beyond my fiddling skills atm):
The red line indicate the actual source of light - here the approximation of a headlight.
The spikes are actually finer, less numerous and with more of a ‘dotted line’ effect.
The filter gives a “photo” bloom effect in addition to the central splash and the spikes, which isn’t present when I’m only eyeballing the headlight. On the other hand, a glass pane will add this effect - though on a far larger zone IIRC, like five to ten times the size of the image.
For particularly intense light, like filament bulb or IIRC the Sun, there is also a strange ‘shadow’ effect around the light source itself : a silhouette of the light, the size of the red line, is visible and somehow seems darker. It seems to be there because the brain don’t know how to handle the transition between white (the bloom) and OMG what’s wrong with those light levels I’m burning it hurts stop it stop it stop it (the source).
Interestingly, some schools of old comic books (from before TV became widespread) drew the Sun or other intense lights in a similar way : lots of long, very fine lines radiating from a blurred white spot.
As it is, I have yet to see one engine or game using real eyeball bloom. I suppose that it is because algorithms are already existing, and are probably simpler than eyeball bloom anyway.
That said, in the case of Infinity, we are supposed to look at things through a cockpit and a helmet, or through a camera, so this kind of bloom may not be out of place.
It is when, say, you are supposed to be a spell-slinging dragonslayer, directly eyeballing the world, that this bloom becomes jarring, the same way raspberry jam on the screen is in a FPS when you are hit (if less so) - by throwing at your face that you are looking through a monitor and artificial images, not using your eyeballs directly, which goes against immersion.
