Irrlicht Engine

HDR Vs. Bloom - differences:





...and other Bloom example:

The 2nd and the 3rd pics are better.

I think I'd prefer the first picture a bit better if there weren't any jaggeds.

seems to be a lot crisper in the first picture, probably because the camera is staring directly at the light so there's greater contrast in the HDR version

oldskoolPunk:
that's a really nice effect you've created there with the toonshading!

i prefer the first pic too, maybe i just don't like bloom, just looks too blurry and fuzzy to me, would annoy me to play a game like that!

Hummm.. i thought the difference between HDR and bloom was that HDR could light the whole scene with its own information, the so called Image Based Lighting, ir IBL for short. Bloom is a postprocessing effect. In fact, i rather bloom, HDR over exposes too much the colours, and, if done with care, Bloom may add a lot of realism to scenes. Obviously, that is an exagerated example, to show the differences, but a good bloom, is impressive.

Bloom just does a bright pass (only bright colors are drawn), blurs it and adds it to the scene.

HDR uses a color range that exceeds the display range (which is 255 per channel). That means there are white surfaces and "whiter than white" surfaces.
Tone mapping is used to determine the overall brightness of the scene and then renders accordingly.
For example if you're outdoor you can see all the grass and trees and stuff and looking into a cave only shows you darkness (pure black). Now if you enter the cave your eyes adjust and you can see better. The "black" cave is now visible to your eye. Looking outside you'll be blended by the light thus seeing only "white". This is only possible by using a higher range of colors.

So there's a big difference in bloom and tonemapping (HDR is NOT a technique!). Bloom is just a cheap effect to create the illusion of very bright objects while tonemapping is trying to recreate the effect of our eyes to adjust to certain environments.

I would prefer the first image when playing a game, because bloom is very easy to overdo and then it ruins everything. Makes it seem like your eyes are a little hazy.

Here are some cheap explosion effects when buildings are destroyed. They are just billboards with texture animations. Got to look into something more nifty. Any ideas?

Here I blew up my power plant.


After getting myself all worked up, I blew up the enemy defence tower. Take that!


And then I went back to my base and blew up the command center

For me the explosion look nice.

Other things you could attemps for more realism:

- Dynamic light source matching the explosion radius.
- Adding billboards for a smoke effect using the particle system (fading after a time)
- Adding Gib's parts of your plant and move them using physic (or even the IRRklicht base collision response animator) while at the same time fading your plant or hiding it to releal a version ofthe plant that is "blowed up".

Thanks to Blindside for all the work on the shaders.

Oh geez Yoran, you didn't have to do that . Guess I'll chuck one in from i3 too (Sorry this is a slightly older shot):

wow, great stuff Yoran/BlindSide
is it an Irrlicht project? (i'm guessing it is 'cos its here, but just incase )

don't see many non-game uses of Irrlicht tho, so thumbs up!

Sample Demo: Underground complex.