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Depth of Field, Lens Flare, HDR, Bloom and such

SymbolicFrank

Magister
Joined
Mar 24, 2010
Messages
1,668
Why are these effects so popular? They emulate the very things that are wrong with old-fashioned, chemical photographs and films. If anything, you would expect everyone to be glad they finally can get rid of those annoying artifacts!

Are those directors stupid? Something that has to be done because that's how it was done for the last century? Or is this something like being a moviefag?

I totally don't get it.
 

pippin

Guest
They help casuals forget that texture quality hasn't improved in many, many years.
 

Akratus

Self-loathing fascist drunken misogynist asshole
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Codex 2016 - The Age of Grimoire Make the Codex Great Again! Grab the Codex by the pussy Insert Title Here Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire Steve gets a Kidney but I don't even get a tag.
They help casuals forget that texture quality hasn't improved in many, many years.
header.jpg
:troll:
 

Metro

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Aug 27, 2009
Messages
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Funny thing is Rage wasn't that bad of a game. Just the whole bullshit over megatextures and zomg greatest visuals EVAH over hyped it.
 

deuxhero

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Flowery Land
Everyone mentions load times, superior graphics, better controls and mods when talking about why PC gaming is superior, but everyone forgets "the ability to turn horrible post processing off"
 

Telengard

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The end of every place
You're asking the wrong people, and you're asking them the wrong question. Instead of asking a Codexer, you have to go and ask a CODdie Kid what could be done to a game to make them feel more like they're an awesome hero in an awesome action movie being totally awesome with their bros while they shoot a few towel-heads, and thus, maybe, if you make them excited enough, maybe get them to buy a copy And once you hear their answers, then you'll know.

Oh, they won't use words like "bloom" and "lens flare", since their vocabulary and education are far too poor for that. But they'll barf out a close enough approximation - eventually - that you'll probably mostly understand what they're saying. And then, once you have heard what the CODdie Kids have to say, then you won't just intellectually know the answer to your question, you'll feel it in your gut, somewhere in amongst the gnawing despair.
 

Sodafish

Arcane
Joined
Dec 26, 2012
Messages
8,476
There's nothing wrong with these things in principle. They're simply overused and/or misused. However, they are not "artifacts" and have nothing to do with film photography, but rather are just consequences of optics. For example, any lens has a depth of field (including our eyes). HDR is simply an attempt to better match the dynamic range perceivable by our visual system (which far exceeds that of film or digital sensors), but is nearly always overdone. And so on...
 

Hirato

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Depth of Field and Motion Blur render games unplayable in my opinion.
I don't mind it during cutscenes, but during gameplay, that shit needs to be turned off!

I've kind of gotten used to bloom and HDR. Even though almost no one implements HDR to be anything other than bloom by another name, which is a bit sad.
I don't mind bloom so much when it's done as a subtle effect that makes glowy things glowy.
But when it's like Oblivion where you basically have a bright and blurry version of the scene superimposed on the scene itself, you've gone way too far.
 

SymbolicFrank

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You're asking the wrong people, and you're asking them the wrong question. Instead of asking a Codexer, you have to go and ask a CODdie Kid what could be done to a game to make them feel more like they're an awesome hero in an awesome action movie being totally awesome with their bros while they shoot a few towel-heads, and thus, maybe, if you make them excited enough, maybe get them to buy a copy And once you hear their answers, then you'll know.
Being an action movie hero. Sounds plausible.


Btw, that's also the main problem with 3D movies: CGI looks great, but anything recorded is only sharp at the location the director wants you to watch.
 

Hoaxmetal

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Jul 19, 2009
Messages
9,157
You're asking the wrong people, and you're asking them the wrong question. Instead of asking a Codexer, you have to go and ask a CODdie Kid what could be done to a game to make them feel more like they're an awesome hero in an awesome action movie being totally awesome with their bros while they shoot a few towel-heads, and thus, maybe, if you make them excited enough, maybe get them to buy a copy And once you hear their answers, then you'll know.
Being an action movie hero. Sounds plausible.


Btw, that's also the main problem with 3D movies: CGI looks great, but anything recorded is only sharp at the location the director wants you to watch.
I had to watch Guardians of Galaxy 3D from first row side seats, half of the screen was a blur D:
 

Wilian

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Divinity: Original Sin
Depth of field, lens flares and motion blur are useless. HDR lighting can serve a purpose.
 

Unkillable Cat

LEST WE FORGET
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Codex 2014 Make the Codex Great Again! Grab the Codex by the pussy
We not only have had this discussion less than a couple of months ago, but there was a poll as well that time.

That said, the ONLY time I've seen the Depth of Field effect used in a good manner was while using the Motion Tracker in Alien: Isolation. The background becomes blurry because your attention is on a tiny screen right in front of your nose - not to mention it makes sense from a game balance perspective.
 

Mr. Pink

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PC RPG Website of the Year, 2015 Codex 2016 - The Age of Grimoire Steve gets a Kidney but I don't even get a tag.
Why do people have problems with HDR and bloom? Computer monitors are incapable of displaying all the contrast of reality, so HDR increases the contrast to allow bright and dark objects to still have detail. Just because some retarded devs go overboard with it doesn't mean it's inherently bad...

The real menace to gaming and movies is Chromatic Aberration.
 

Sodafish

Arcane
Joined
Dec 26, 2012
Messages
8,476
Yeah, CA just looks fucking horrible, and the way it's implemented in games does qualify as an artifact in the true sense. In games it tends to be applied in some weird, overly uniform way to the edges of objects with an increasing gradient from centre>edges of frame, which only roughly approximates one kind of CA (lateral CA) in optics. Axial/longitudinal CA is not modelled at all as far as I know.

Once again, our eyes are fucking amazing at correcting this, whereas only the very best apochromatic lenses come close to eliminating it entirely, and typically cost many thousands of dorra.
 

Machocruz

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Jul 7, 2011
Messages
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Hyperborea
I don't have a problem with HDR light. It was a significant incline in 3D graphics. Bloom was a shitty stop-gap solution.

DoF the way it's done in games and film is emulation of photography. Instead of letting the viewer's eyes decide what object at what distance to focus on, the artist does it for you by blurring what he/she doesn't want you to focus on at that particular moment. And things don't gaussian blur as they recede into the distance, they lose contrast between light and shade, edges, and they lose become paler due to atmospheric perspective.

In film and cutscenes it's less egregious because cinema is about the director's vision and control of how exactly he wants his story to be conveyed. But gameplay is about what the player decides or needs to see, which varies, and we got along just fine without such a crude gimmick.

EDIT: Considering how many AAA games are wannabe films anyway, DoF away I guess.
 

Sodafish

Arcane
Joined
Dec 26, 2012
Messages
8,476
In cinematography you often don't have as much control over DOF as you imagine either. This is often constrained by the amount of light available in the scene (and thus the required f-stop) and the focal length chosen for the shot. Our eyes have a relatively short focal length and small aperture (~ f/3.5), so you only get that extremely short DOF when focussing on things very close to your eyes, which is why its overemphasis in game fx looks stupid and unnatural.
 

TedNugent

Arcane
Joined
Dec 16, 2013
Messages
6,329
The consoles last generation suffered from two serious effects that damaged image quality.

The first effect is low resolution images. The Xbox 360 had a hardware framebuffer eDRAM die, but it was only 10 MB in size. Developers could use this framebuffer's larger bandwidth to add low-cost anti aliasing to the image, but they would sometimes have to downsize the image resolution to get it to fit inside the 10 MB framebuffer. This is part of why you had some games on the Xbox 360 that had low resolution playback, including such high profile games as Halo 3 and Call of Duty 4, which ran at sub-720p resolutions.

The second effect is lack of anti aliasing. The Playstation 3 was notorious for often having games with either no anti aliasing solution or a 2xAA. The Xbox 360 never exceeded 4xAA, and often relied on 2xAA.

This shitty image quality resulted in a proliferation of post process effects to cover up the shitty resolution and jaggies, also known as DOF, lensflare, HDR, bloom, motion blur, etc.
 

SymbolicFrank

Magister
Joined
Mar 24, 2010
Messages
1,668
It's all shit.

Yes, that was where I was coming from as well. High Dynamic Range means that you don't simply use large or small grain film, with the shutter speed that goes with it. Because that only works if the whole scene has roughly the same light intensity.

I do see why people would feel that making part of the screen blindingly white conveys the message: "It's dark in here, so your pupils are expanded and the bright light blinds you." But in that case, the effect should gradually decline and only last seconds.

Bloom is a bit problematic, because it can mean many different things; from a pseudo-Anti-Aliasing to a simplistic full-screen motion blur to prevent people getting a headache from a very low frame rate. Or to pretend the resolution isn't as low as it is. It's basically a smoothing/unfocus filter.


Btw: I like God Rays, when done well.
 
Last edited:

Cadmus

Arcane
Joined
Dec 28, 2013
Messages
4,264
You're asking the wrong people, and you're asking them the wrong question. Instead of asking a Codexer, you have to go and ask a CODdie Kid what could be done to a game to make them feel more like they're an awesome hero in an awesome action movie being totally awesome with their bros while they shoot a few towel-heads, and thus, maybe, if you make them excited enough, maybe get them to buy a copy And once you hear their answers, then you'll know.

Oh, they won't use words like "bloom" and "lens flare", since their vocabulary and education are far too poor for that. But they'll barf out a close enough approximation - eventually - that you'll probably mostly understand what they're saying. And then, once you have heard what the CODdie Kids have to say, then you won't just intellectually know the answer to your question, you'll feel it in your gut, somewhere in amongst the gnawing despair.
You are a retard.
OMG SO MUSH EDUKATION, I KNOW WHAT BLUM AND LENS FLER MEANS!!!
fuck you for making me stand up for the CoD crowd. I'm pretty sure everybody who plays games knows what these effect do, this forum isn't some university where only the smartest and brightest specimen can read long sentences while the rest of the world eat their own shit.
 

Zarniwoop

TESTOSTERONIC As Fuck™
Patron
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Shadorwun: Hong Kong
Says the guy who complains about GUNPLAY in a fucking RPG.
 

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