Level Design Bloom Tutorial

[[TW]Ramm-Jaeger]

As I have been playing through a lot of the custom maps, one of the things I have noticed is that the bloom settings on the custom maps are generally not set properly. I see a lot of what I call "radioactive level" syndrome, where it looks like the whole level and sky are glowing with radiation, or the other problem that I see is "white out" syndrome, where the level is so bloomed it looks white. One thing to remember when creating your custom level, is that while you might not play with bloom settings on, a lot of poeple do. If bloom is not set up properly, it will make poeple not want to play your map if they use bloom. To help the community mappers get this right, I have created a bloom tutorial. I have attached it in word document format, as well as posting the tutorial here. I hope you will find it useful.

Bloom Tutorial

The goal of this tutorial is to guide you through the process of properly setting the bloom values for your level.

Start Here

The very first thing you want to do before you start is to make sure you have bloom turned on. You can toggle bloom by typing

 

[Rich_Zap]

I shall incorporate this knowledge into my map korosten (when i get to the playable stage anyway XD). I dont use the bloom effect myself as my computer is old and slow but thats no reason to make others suffer . Its good to see official tutorials for this stuff, i dont know of any other developer who does this.

Perhaps all tutorials official or otherwise could have their own sub section ? Might make navigating and using them a little better especially for new forum members.

 

[Shurek]

This post deserves a 'STICKY'

 

[DONT_SHOOT]

this post deserves a free beer!

 

[Psycho_Sam]

Nice one Ramm

 

[Six_Ten]

Add EnvironmentMap to LevelInfo

Add EnvironmentMap to LevelInfo

1. In LevelInfo there is a slot for an environment map. I plugged my EnvMap into this. Is it where the Bloom is calculated from and did I set it up correctly? If not, where does the engine calculate the Bloom effect?

2. The Bloom effect must actually be LDR not HDR. That is Low Dynamic Rnage, not High Dynamic Range, or is there a way to use .hdr,.exr, or other 32-bit floating point image formats. Terragen and other programs can export .hdr images and I'll use this if possible.

 

[Xendance]

On the map I'm working on, I get like a 60 fps performance hit if I enable bloom. There's hardly anything on the screen either.

So I'm asking, which setting affect the FPS and in what way? Is the performance hit bigger if you increase for example blurmult?

 

[Nestor Makhno]

Just a bump to ask Ramm to update this, reflecting the new patch, when he gets the chance.

 

[Xendance]

New commands are: postfxbloom_ratiomin/ratiomax/ratio

The ratiomax defines the max amount of bloom, ratiomin defines the min amount of bloom. Don't know what the ratio thing means. It could be the value which determines when the bloom scales down when you look at something "bloomy". Experiment
I hope it's ok for me to tell this.

But Ramm, or any of the coders, should tell what they exactly do.

 

[tryphon]

Thanks for this tutorial, i will look it for my following maps!
It' s very hard for beginners like me to set the right properties for these actors .

 

[Xendance]

tryphon, this tutorial is obsolete. New one can be found here: http://www.redorchestragame.com/index.php?categoryid=3&p13_sectionid=5

 

[tryphon]

Thx Xendance, i will look at it.