Is an HDR/filmic tonemapping plugin possible?

[Audiophage]

I feel like the one thing holding VaM back in terms of realistic visuals is the tonemapping. Overbrights are too saturated and the dynamic range is squashed down to effectively zero. It feels like it's from a game that came out 10 years ago, is there a potential way to revamp it via plugins, or is that a 100% backend thing?

 

[MacGruber]

It feels like it's from a game that came out 10 years ago,

Well, technically it almost is

AFAIK there is no HDR possible, but you can do something similar to Tonemapping. You know about PostMagic UserLUT's? Essentially you take a screenshot of your scene and tweak the colors in Photoshop (or whatever other software) to your liking. Then all you got to do is take the Neutral LUT texture (comes with PostMagic) and apply the exact same color transformations in the exact same order to the texture. Save the file as a new LUT as PNG file and load it in your VaM scene with PostMagic's UserLUT module. Note that LUT can only do color remapping, it can't do anything that depends on neighboring pixels, say like a blur effect. You need to use other PostMagic effects for that.

 

[Audiophage]

My idea (although I'm not a coder) was to somehow intercept pixel luminance values before they're actually written to any kind of buffer and remap them from there. The problem with LUTs is that there's no way of differentiating the brightness of two pixels with the same color, even though one might actually be brighter.

 

[MacGruber]

Without HDR there is no such thing. Colors are capped at 255/255/255 in VaM.

 

[Audiophage]

What version of Unity does VaM run on?

 

[MacGruber]

What version of Unity does VaM run on?

2018.1.9f2

That has HDR support, but it's not enabled for VaM.

 

[Audiophage]

I see. Is it disabled because of performance issues, or shader compatibility, or something else entirely?

 

[MacGruber]

Performance. VaM's performance is terrible in VR as it is.

 

[Audiophage]

Still seems like something it would be nice to have as a toggleable option for people who use desktop mode or have really high-end hardware.