Beautiful Post-Processing with HDRI Skies
Cinemachine and Timeline Final Framework Log 2
High Dynamic Range Images or HDRIs have the power to completely transform your scene by influencing lighting and the overall atmosphere or vibe of your scene. Today I am documenting how I used post-processing to compliment an HDRI environment and accentuate some of its properties.
If you’re unfamiliar with my framework-type articles, they focus more on thought-process rather than being a guided step-by-step.
Objective: Detailing how I used post-processing to complement my HDRI environment.
Table of Contents
· Accentuating Temperature and Terrain
∘ Adding Bloom
· Light and Reflection
· Tonemapping
· Color Correction with Lift, Gamma Gain
· Environmental Fog
· Quality of Life and Clean Up
∘ Anti-aliasing
∘ Occlusion Culling
· The Result
∘ Before
∘ After
Note: This article is the second part of a log documenting my process to complete a Cinemachine and Timeline Framework assigned by my apprenticeship at GameDevHQ. Catch up with the first one here. The finalized version will be an animated spaceship scene with diffrent camera angles.
Accentuating Temperature and Terrain
A quick update first: In the last update, I had an HDRI Environment featuring the darkness of space and Jupiter.
I’ve changed my environment to an in-planet atmosphere that gives me more room to play with when it comes to enhancing the environment with the natural attributes of the scenery.
Adding Bloom
I already had a Volume Profile set up from the first framework so I can just start adding overrides right away. The first one in the itinerary is one of my favorites, bloom. Bloom is usually used to enhance bright lights and give off the illusion of camera imperfections, for my scene I wanted to use it to accentuate that sort of hot environment haze.
If you live in a warm climate or have seen an area like this before, you know the kind of haze I’m talking about, almost like the day looks blurry and dusty, and the sun is just as well.
Let’s take a look at how Bloom affected my scene:
I really enjoy the hazy effect it provides and how it accentuates not only the heat of the environment, but the terrain has a sort of “dust clouds” feel to it as well.
Light and Reflection
HDRI Environments provide a lot of different light and reflective properties to your scene by simply encapsulating every surrounding with its own range of brightness, darkness, and color information. You can get the most out of this by placing Light Probes and Reflection Probes.
At this stage of my project, I’m still playing around with their placement because I want to make sure I get the proper interpolation of lighting and I’ve never used them in such a broad environment. The reason why I placed them in a grid is that this might be the spacing of where my animation occurs — as my ship moves in the given space, I want to make sure there is a proper light interpolation.
This placement will likely change as I progress especially since light probe usage in outdoor areas tends to be a lot more selective than my experimental approach. But hey that’s game dev for you — trial and error :)
Here is my scene with Screen Spaced Reflection/Reflection Probes, Light Probes, and Ambient Occlusion. As you can see, there is accurate reflection and lighting where there are brighter areas in the environment. The ambient occlusion handles the nook and cranny soft shadows.
On a side note: I got rid of the default sun so I could control lighting through post-processing instead
Tonemapping
Tonemapping is often paired with the usage of Bloom, with Bloom always being applied first so that we can make full use of its high-range values. I used tonemapping to give the colors of my environment a bit more vibrance, while also adding to the warm tones.
Color Correction with Lift, Gamma Gain
This override allows us to perform three-way color grading on the scene. You can control the dark tones, mid-range tones, and highlights respectively. I usually like to use this override as part of my finishing touches. Here I used it to balance the level of detail and color tone.
Environmental Fog
Going back to accentuating the terrain, I added a fog override to further state the appearance of dust in the environment.
Quality of Life and Clean Up
Anti-aliasing
I made sure to tweak the Anti-aliasing in my Main Camera to smooth out any jagged edges.
Occlusion Culling
Occlusion Culling was added to improve performance and remove potential taxation from the CPU and GPU. Objects marked as Static Occluder and Static Occludee will not be rendered when the camera is not viewing them, this makes it so that we don’t spend unnecessary resources rendering everything all the time, even things that aren’t even in view.
The Result
Before
After
