HDR - The Halo Way * Spin-Off

[AlNom]

Question regarding the Flood (for the technical-minded):

Spoiler

For those who have played the game and seen how the Flood are presented, how are they doing all the morphing and transformations? You can see they've gone above and beyond what they did in Halo 2, where they introduced the flood spores reviving fallen Flood combat forms as long as they are intact. It was pretty simple, just make them get back up.

But in Halo 3, the Flood spores can also infect fallen Brutes, Elites, or Humans, and there's the whole transformation sequence that seems really neat. And taking it further, they have that insectoid crawler Flood form that can merge (?) or transform into that bigger Flood creature.

How is that done? Through MEMEXPORT? I seem to recall that early XNA video with the evolution of creatures...

 

[Rockster]

...I personally think the 13 stop range of FP10 is fine for a render target...

According to "HDR Bungie Way" slide 52, FP10 7e3 only afforded them 3 stops. Why the discrepancy between your and their calculation? It's obvious the decisions to use multiple render targets was made long ago based on their image quality investigations and not something bolted on last minute. I understand why alpha blending was a requirement for them as well as the artistic direction of exploiting HDR, but it seems if there would have been hardware support for 6e4 they may have opted for a single render target. They obviously felt 7e3 didn't give them the range and went to fairly elaborate lengths to get around it. Do you know of any 7e3 HDR examples, game or otherwise, that properly illustrate the range you indicated?

 

[_phil_]

Maybe they did hit nasty banding too fast because of heavy shader /post processing blending.

 

[Rangers]

Considering the end game result I'm not confident Bungie made the right tactical decision, lets just say that.

Sure, overall the game has nice lighting and is very pretty, top 5 pretty, but as a total graphical package is hugely flawed.

 

[ERP]

Doesn't sound like a particularly good mechanism to me, but without actually running tests, it's hard to know for sure.

Devs especially technically competent ones can get attached to ideas they see as clever and sometimes end up stuck with them.

I've done this in the past, my first PS1 game used this really clever sorting mechanism........ The code was extremely clever but ... in my case just bucket sorting the polys and using artist based sorting hints would have achieved much the same effect and given me much higher polygon throughput.

One of my interview questions is always about what approach the candidate would take to certain problems, and it's amazing how commonly people prefer complex solutions to simple ones. This is especially true if they are popular or common in papers on the subject.

Not saying it's the case here, but sometimes things are implemented the way they are just because it was percieved to be "clever" at the time.

 

[Cryect]

According to "HDR Bungie Way" slide 52, FP10 7e3 only afforded them 3 stops. Why the discrepancy between your and their calculation?

Probably made the mistake of only considering the range of the exponent (3 bits) for stops instead of considering the min to max value comparison.

 

[assen]

Just one thing relevant to ths thread: you don't need to keep 2 RT in edram at the same time to do what they maybe do, so the argument of extra memory needed for their HDR technique doesn't sound good to me.

You do, unless you want to go through the scene a second time - if they didn't mind this, they wouldn't mind tiling. And for some reason (which is not obvious to me, given their relatively sparse scenes), they didn't want to pay the price for another scene pass.

 

[iceberg187]

Bungie and Rare are the two principale studios of microsoft games
Bungie have could to recycle the engine of perfect dark no?
the same strange resolution
the same HDR?
the same motion blur?
...

Turn 10 uses the toolchain of Rare, not Bungie.

 

[archangelmorph]

Question regarding the Flood (for the technical-minded):

Spoiler

For those who have played the game and seen how the Flood are presented, how are they doing all the morphing and transformations? You can see they've gone above and beyond what they did in Halo 2, where they introduced the flood spores reviving fallen Flood combat forms as long as they are intact. It was pretty simple, just make them get back up.

But in Halo 3, the Flood spores can also infect fallen Brutes, Elites, or Humans, and there's the whole transformation sequence that seems really neat. And taking it further, they have that insectoid crawler Flood form that can merge (?) or transform into that bigger Flood creature.

How is that done? Through MEMEXPORT? I seem to recall that early XNA video with the evolution of creatures...

Animation?

It really isn't rocket science..

 

[Mintmaster]

According to "HDR Bungie Way" slide 52, FP10 7e3 only afforded them 3 stops.

It afforded them 3 stops headroom, i.e. brighter than white. And that's because they wanted lots of range (over 10 stops) between the whitepoint and darkest grey (i.e. the domain of the tonemapping curve).

It definately wasn't a last minute decision, but it's based on a rather rigid analysis of they eye's limits rather than what is visually acceptable. Surely the dynamic range seen in photos taken by the best $3000 digital SLRs and camcorders is adequate? The rest of the image and content isn't up to photorealism by any means, so there's no need to overspec the DR to go way beyond that.

 

[AlNom]

Animation?

It really isn't rocket science..

But a complete shift from a human body that adds more geometry to the body dynamically? There are those crawler forms that mutate into the giant forms... That's just pure animation ? :|

I don't believe it's so simple otherwise they would have done it in Halo 2.

Found the XNA Xenomorph thread...

http://forum.beyond3d.com//showthread.php?t=21620

Post detail:
http://forum.beyond3d.com//showpost.php?p=518493&postcount=22

Doesn't seem that easy. :|

edit: okay, so maybe it isn't adding geometry, but it seems more intensive than just "simple animation" would imply.

 

[archangelmorph]

But a complete shift from a human body that adds more geometry to the body dynamically? There are those crawler forms that mutate into the giant forms... That's just pure animation ? :|

I don't believe it's so simple otherwise they would have done it in Halo 2.

Found the XNA Xenomorph thread...

http://forum.beyond3d.com//showthread.php?t=21620

Post detail:
http://forum.beyond3d.com//showpost.php?p=518493&postcount=22

Doesn't seem that easy. :|

edit: okay, so maybe it isn't adding geometry, but it seems more intensive than just "simple animation" would imply.

You could do the same thing by some fancy blending between two sepearate meshes & two separate skeletons at run time.. Would definitely require some heavy tweaking to get it to work right but since it would have to be a completely dynamic system (code that allows you to blend from any model with an arbitrary skel playing an anim to any other model with an arbitrary skel playing an anim..) you'd be pretty free to tweak to your hearts content..

The other option (which they probably did since it would provide complete artistic control of the morphing..) would be to cheat altogether by have a since vertex anim based morphing of the first model with ends in a particular pose and then just switch models to the fully rigged resultant actor which you can then proceed to animate at will..

In the end it really isn't that hard to find a 100 ways to do produce that kind of visual effect..

 

[Cyan]

Edited 2 years after I had wrote the message. Halo 3 is not the game it should be, and Halo 1 and 2 are the masterpieces of the series. Halo 3 is way overrated

 

[Fran]

Doesn't sound like a particularly good mechanism to me, but without actually running tests, it's hard to know for sure.

Devs especially technically competent ones can get attached to ideas they see as clever and sometimes end up stuck with them.

I've done this in the past, my first PS1 game used this really clever sorting mechanism........ The code was extremely clever but ... in my case just bucket sorting the polys and using artist based sorting hints would have achieved much the same effect and given me much higher polygon throughput.

One of my interview questions is always about what approach the candidate would take to certain problems, and it's amazing how commonly people prefer complex solutions to simple ones. This is especially true if they are popular or common in papers on the subject.

I totally agree with you. My first reaction when listening to the presentation on this HDR implementation was something like "Ehm... why?". It all sounded too complicate with the single goal of never ever seeing banding in any situation, which might be an interesting feature if it wasn't complicating things so much, in my opinion.

Not saying it's the case here, but sometimes things are implemented the way they are just because it was percieved to be "clever" at the time.

This is the single big problem I see in the Industry nowadays and I think it's much more difficult to choose simple solutions than "clever" and complicate ones.
One of my favourite quotes is: "Any fool can write code that a machine can understand, only good programmers write code that a human can understand".

 

[AlNom]

FWIW, MS has updated the slides with screenshot comparisons - all the stuff they cut out pre-launch of the game.

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/...1D-6BBD-4731-AC82-D9524237D486&displaylang=en

 

[E2K]

The overbloomed screenshots of an explosion caught in its lightest moment in photo-mode have about as much relevance to the lighting of Halo 3 as a shot displaying full-on a brick wall at the closest possible distance would have to the quality of textures.

This is the lighting of Halo 3:

http://image.com.com/gamespot/images/2008/051/926632_20080221_screen003.jpg

Notice the sunlight on the cliffs, it looks very "sunny", almost makes you want to squint - but there is plenty of detail in the dark parts of the shot.

http://xbox360media.ign.com/xbox360/image/article/803/803187/halo-3-20070711001713324.jpg

See the white-out-ed triangle in the rightmost part of the shot? See how the bloom on the stone in the lower left part, below the elbow of the character, hasn't destroyed the texture detail? This is the "good HDR" we are talking about.

Those are pre-rendered pictures and thus have nothing to do with the real game and/or it's "hdr"-rendering methods.

 

[Laa-Yosh]

Those are rendered in the game engine and while they have better AA + texture filtering than what's possible in real time, they are still fully representative of every other feature of the game engine. Particularly the HDR implementation.

 

[Shifty Geezer]

Those are pre-rendered pictures and thus have nothing to do with the real game and/or it's "hdr"-rendering methods.

For God's sake, we are NOT having another PR Bullshot discussion!! If you don't know what a PR shot is and how it's created, you plain don't belong on this board. It's created in game, using in-game gameplay engine, with increased resolution and IQ for creating nice print images. None of which is at all relevant as the game has been out for 2 years and there's a wealth of real game footage and screenshots and experience to call on without needing to find pre-release promo shots.

If you have a point, source some examples that prove it. Anyone not presenting evidence for their case is not discussing but bickering.

 

[E2K]

For God's sake, we are NOT having another PR Bullshot discussion!! If you don't know what a PR shot is and how it's created, you plain don't belong on this board. It's created in game, using in-game gameplay engine, with increased resolution and IQ for creating nice print images. None of which is at all relevant as the game has been out for 2 years and there's a wealth of real game footage and screenshots and experience to call on without needing to find pre-release promo shots.

If you have a point, source some examples that prove it. Anyone not presenting evidence for their case is not discussing but bickering.

It is very hard to find realtime shots, using google images.

http://xbox360media.ign.com/xbox360/image/article/822/822415/halo-3-20070923023607458.jpg
http://www.cinemablend.com/images/gallery/s12878/_12244320517075.jpg
http://xbox360media.ign.com/xbox360/image/article/822/822415/halo-3-20070923023433241.jpg
http://360.kombo.com/images/media/h3_053.jpg
http://xbox360media.ign.com/xbox360/image/article/822/822415/halo-3-20070923023555552.jpg
http://xbox360media.ign.com/xbox360/image/article/822/822415/halo-3-20070923023605849.jpg
http://360.kombo.com/images/media/h3_053.jpg
http://xbox360media.ign.com/xbox360/image/article/822/822415/halo-3-20070923023548724.jpg

However, all pre-rendered Halo3 artwork seems to have excellent HDR applied.
assen did a great job showing me the HDR in the Halo3 pr-shots. Could he, or somebody else find a realtime, ingame screenshot that also has it? I gave up after 5 minutes

 

[warb]

E2K, all of the Halo 3 screenshots you've found have the same HDR. Have you not seen the game running? It should be easy enough to find video.