Filmic Tonemapper default settings

Hello,

With Filmic Tonemapper being the default Tonemapper in 4.15 and beyond, I find the default settings to be very unpleasant. To demonstrate what’s wrong I have used a color chart here:

  1. Unlit view. You can see all the black to white levels individually. (Sun at 3.14 intensity being perpendicular to the surface and skylight with 1 intensity, auto exposure disabled)
  1. Old tonemapper. There is some clipping in blacks.
  1. Filmic tonemapper. Too much clipping in blacks.
  1. Lowering Slope and Toe to undo the clipping results in purely washed out image.

Quote from release notes:

Any ideas?

Well, there seems to be a lot of issues and confusion with the new tonemapper, also in regards to how emissive is handled.
I think that Epic still needs some time for refining this and also, you basically need 2 different approaches for tonemapping when qworking on a SDR screen but you want to output HDR in the end.
Depending on how you do the SDR mapping for that content, results can vary from really bad to kind of okay…but it definitely is something that doesnt feel fully finished in Unreal just yet.

Besides that, ACES tonemapping is known for its high crunch factor of blacks and whites and personally, I dont like the look of it too much.

You can see a couple of comparison shots here that further illustrate the problems I see with the ACES standard, but time will tell how Epic will tackle all of these.

http://forums.odforce.net/topic/25019-hable-and-aces-tonemapping/

If you check the provided images here, you can see that ACES in almost every instance provides visually less pleasing results :frowning:

Cheers!

EDIT: I think whats needed is a seperate tonemapper curve for the SDR output since thats what most people use right now anyways. We basically do something similar where we map the HDR stuff into SDR for working with non HDR screens and that tonemapper is configured in a way that basically makes things look correct when working in SDR and then when you output HDR, it takes care of the conversation and everything just works. So I guess that Epic would really need to upgrade their display mapper for this to work properly, but then again…all of this stuff is so new that I havent wrapped my head around it completely :S

Tonemap is done at the end of post process pipeline and it’s done globally for all pixels. It’s does handle emissive just like any other light.

I know! But ACES handles values above 1 completely different which is causing the frustration for people when working with emissive surfaces.

Filmic is in the name, it’s definitely not intended to be accurate. I wish Epic would give information regarding the reasoning, direction, and intended work flow adjustments for big changes like this.

I know that you know. I just wanted to point it out for people that does not know.

This seems like one of those things that wouldn’t get any special treatment for a long time. My main problem is that I’m selling a lot of content on marketplace right now. Almost every client who grabs the content for 4.15 has the new tonemapper on by default and they’re now seeing the content/lighting way different than in 4.14 and before. And what I can do is A) counter the new tonemapper by applying a special LUT to all PPV in all my works or B) tame the new tonemapper to not look as bad as it looks on default settings. So far tweaking settings doesn’t make the new tonemapper anything better than the old one, if not worse. So I’m really curious how this Filmic tonemapper was intended to be used, and why is it now on by default…? :frowning:

Seems like the new tonemapper is really crushing a lot of the blacks and desaturating the colours, it gives a filmic appearance which is what a lot of people want to see out of their scenes but on consumer grade screens it is going to look pretty bad.

@Deadalus51 I much prefer the Hable tonemapping LUT, Do you have any LUT textures I could use to test it?

another comparison: Shader - Shadertoy BETA

I just don’t understand why there needs to be any squirting on the colors to begin with. Don’t need pre-applied instagram filters, just output the actual colors, I’ll handle the corrections on my end captain “filmic”-filters thankyouverymuch.

I’m in 4.16.1 is there any way to recover the old tone mapping (ex: 4.14) in 4.16?

To be more specific, can I get the exact old emissive material color under the new tone mapping?