Effects - How much is too much?

Battlescape
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Yes, there is bloom in those screenshots; pretty prevalent in two of them.

It’s also half, at least, of the intensity we see in the latest screenshots of the Hellion. Which is the point of this thread. Not the effect’s existence, but it’s intensity.

When I made the post Lomsor quotes in the OP, that was my concern, that the bloom was too intense, not that it was in the image at all.

For what it’s worth, INovaeAndre agreed and commented that it was a simple matter to tweak; I’d assumed that that was the end of the issue.

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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.

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You people still need to understand: bloom is a prominent phenomenon observed in lense artifacts. It simply doesn’t look right when it doesn’t correspond its counterpart lensing. It’s a hack which only substitutes a limited case of lense artifacts. It looks bad when we pretend it’s some imaginary special component to visualization, and ignore the many other fundamentally-indifferentiable ways lenses will also screw with light in simultaneity.

It’s important to note how the same mechanism causing these “light artifacts” has various instances beyond the viewer’s lense. There’s lots of different materials which can cause an apparently anomalous appearance due to the many interesting ways light can be diffracted, refracted and reflected.

Bloom is a hack in the same way diffuse/specular models are hacks; and they’re trying to capture different parts of (eventually) the same phenomena. We’re talking like Greek mathematics, not Babylonian.

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.

Any visual phenomena due to your brain is not bloom as it shall be properly defined; I assure you. You’re accounting multiple phenomena happening at once, and so your analysis is pretty crappy.

High dynamic range imagics are also sorta part of the hack that is bloom. If I-Novae wanted physically based lense phenomena, they’d be working with spectral radiance – and hopefully with the representational fidelity necessary to simulate an imperceptibly high amount of energy being diffused into greater area, by some means.

“Bloom” as we know it seems to be much more evident in particular camera photos. Our eyes have very different lenses (less distance to propagate), eh.

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.

In my opinion: pooop! I have like 5 things to say about this statement. I guess I’ll just revert to being immature rather than trying to properly pick out what I want to say.

Well…

Before, you were talking about your brain causing artifacts with your perception.
Now you’re talking about eyeballs.

Regarding why you suppose: I don’t think these graphics programmers even know what they’re doing. They’re a monkey chain.

If they knew what they were doing (they probably didn’t), then I’d ask: maybe they were trying to produce “camera bloom” rather than eyeballs? I guess they were working from photo references to produce photo-realism rather than eyeball-real-ism, or they imagined the player is interfacing with the game world through a camera, or they just think cameras can make sexier lense-flares and better, more fancy cinematics than eyeballs can.

:stuck_out_tongue:

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That last part of your post says it all. Games have effects that can’t be seen with the naked eye on purpose, to make graphics fancier. Heck, pick Battlefield as an example, how could one see a lens flare without a camera? But that’s ok, games don’t have to be realistic, they have to be good looking, realism is boring.
EDIT: Huh I just noticed that maybe I wasn’t really clear. What I mean is that it’s ok to be pursuing photo-realism, but there’s a limit to everything, so in that case it’s good to put in some camera effects, in my opinion.

About the bloom yeah it is just a little excessive, but not too bad I guess. I personally don’t mind, if it was just a little bit less it would be totally ok for me.

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Yeah. Nice input. :smiley:
As I said, I-Novae’s implementation is pretty darn sexy and that’s why this complaining and these meticulous micro-management comments I find around here all the time about a game that isn’t out of pre-production yet seems incessant to me. (sorry for the run on sentence, I’m lazy and tired)

I should refine my rant about bloom a bit regarding this paragraph:

High dynamic range imagics are also sorta part of the hack that is bloom. If I-Novae wanted physically based lense phenomena, they’d be working with spectral radiance – and hopefully with the representational fidelity necessary to simulate an imperceptibly high amount of energy being diffused into greater area, by some means.

HDR is an aspect which likely contributes to how bloom will be perceptually adapted within context – given various lighting conditions – but the glowing halos themselves are all lense-effects baby! There’s probably lots of opportunities for crazy lense artifacts with our crappy distorting eyeballs and cameras, but they’re sorta filtered as pink noise I guess. So, that’s the other part to why “brightness matters to bloom”, especially in global-context; dealing with imagics rather than spectral transmittance (e.g. intense beam being diffused when it’d be 1px of white otherwise). That’s why the night is so cool. Light is naked and Jacuzzi-ready at night. :worried:

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Operative word being “temporarily”.

I ride a motorcycle, often at night or around sunrise and sunset, often in less than ideal conditions, so I guess you could say I’m probably more aware of how bright lights effect my vision. Have to be, any time I fail to predict a pair of headlights coming over a hill on a moonless night, I feel surprised I survived.

I can tell you that even riding straight into a setting or rising sun, with plenty of windows on either side of the street to reflect it for maximum overexposure, it still only takes my body a second or two to adjust to the point where I can see small children playing with balls again (and less important thing like oncoming trucks in my lane). The mechanics of the human eye, the instinctive tilt of the head, perhaps the brain’s decision that suffering a bit of pain is less important than seeing the aforementioned onrushing truck, all pull together to quickly and effectively ignore one of the brightest sources of light an average person is likely to see.

So why would my interstellar spaceship’s holographic simulation, of itself and it’s surroundings as seen from the outside, be unable to tone down the light coming out of it’s own engines? Even if it couldn’t do it, why would the person I’m playing, the pilot of the craft, not be able to make the same subconscious adjustments I do? Or more to the point, why would a bench sitting near a fire have a permanent bloom effect on it, as mentioned by IA?

Oh well, I’m not saying that making blooms temporary should be a priority, just saying why I think having the option to turn them off is more realistic than having them on all the time.

EDIT: No, I’m not saying that I could adjust to a flashbang in an unlit basement in a matter of seconds, pretty sure it’d leave me as blind after going off as I had been before it. Just that it’s a lot faster, for my eyes at least, to adjust to bright lights than none at all.

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What analysis are you talking about, I simply made observations about what visual artefacts are created by eyeballing instead of taking pictures. I call it “bloom”, because the bloom in modern game engines has the same role : visual artefacts created by excessive light levels.
Names aren’t really important, as long as it is clear which phenomenon we are talking about.

**[quote=“Indicable, post:23, topic:308”]
Before, you were talking about your brain causing artifacts with your perception.Now you’re talking about eyeballs.
[/quote]

Brain is part of the perception system ; leaving them out when talking about eyeball is about as appropriate than leaving the sensor out when talking about a camera.
It is not important if the phenomenon is created by the cornea, lens, aqueous humour, viterous humour, retina, optical nerve or brain visual centres. The important is what I see when I look at bright lights.

The massive success of the Kickstarter campaign of Kingdom come : Delivrance would tend to say otherwise, in a very loud way.

Again, the bloom seen there isn’t unrealistic, it is simply taken with a camera (instead of eyeballs) and less than perfect lenses and/or something not completely transparent (glass, mist…) between it and the source. It’s fine as long as it is supposed to be seen by such equipment.

Though real eyeball artefacts instead of classical bloom would look refreshingly better, with the massive overuse of it in recent years. And it would give an unique, very distinguishable (yet familiar) look to any new engine.

Note: the effect I describe is the constant effect that a bright light produces, not the temporary blinding effect. And as Ruinat notes, it is not that blinding. As you can see in my previous crappy approximate mock-up, it hinders vision only very near the light source itself.

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Actually the operative word is “burst” which by definition is temporary. If your retina was to be continually overexposed to intense light it would not only be painful and totally disorienting it could also be permanently disabling. Ultimately the human eye applies a very sophisticated algorithm that, in technical terms, is referred to as a local tonemapping operator. For performance reasons we currently use a global tonemapping operator which means that if a scene has a large amount of variance in the range of luminances present some parts of the image are more likely under or over exposed. As @ThornEel mentioned this is closer to how a camera works than the human eye. I’ve done a lot of research on local tonemapping operators and I’d like to try a few out at some point in the future but for now we don’t have the time and the performance hit may be too much to make it practical anyhow.

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Wooooh!

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Weeee!

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Continuing the discussion from Effects - How much is too much?:

[quote=“hrobertson, post:19, topic:308”]
The blue bits in the golem and props screenshots are glowing. It’s a light source that is illuminating surfaces around it. That’s not bloom.
The bloom on those two sails look good.
I’d say the sail in the middle is a bit too glowy but it’s tempered by the backdrop.

In space with a black background any glow designed to simulate bloom is exaggerated.

Actual photo:

Judging from Andre’s screenshots, if this was in engine it would be more like this:
inovaestudios.blob.core.windows.net/forumsavatars/6328be5bb02e43a6f8a56338f3f30497bca206b934b.jpg[/quote]This is pretty much it. I really hate the glow on the lower picture - the top one has glow but it doesn’t overshine, it’s both subtle and very accentuated. I can still see immediatly around it with very dark areas as they should be.

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Glow is something that’s pretty easy for us to tweak. We haven’t gone through our final polish pass yet so don’t sweat it too much at the moment.

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Of course :smile: