Yep, turned the film tonemapper back on and those settings appeared. Makes sense.
Dear Epic team,
Regarding your decision on removing the old tonemapper and switching to ACES, I believe that you have made a wise decision in terms of catching up with motion picture industry standards. It is a priceless investment for the future of Unreal Engine. All research, development and tough decisions made behind the scene truly appreciated. Thank you!
However, I sincerely have to express that, consequences of your decision on removing the old tonemapper -without offering an alternate way of achieving deprecated neon effect working on the new tonemapper- will be causing a great trouble for the ongoing projects, at least ours! In addition to struggling with serious bugs in the engine, we have to add one more item on our agenda and focus on this paradigm shift as well.
When you look at the big picture, for the sake of switching to motion picture industry standards, we will be losing a fabulous AAA Unreal feature that we all love and use in our games.
Wouldn’t it be much better to have both the old and the new tonemappers, and let the developers choose the most appropriate one that fits to their game genre and artistic style?
If you insist on deprecating the old tonemapper, wouldn’t it be much wiser to remove it after proposing an alternate way of achieving precisely the same neon effect using the new tonemapper?
With all due respect, I would be very pleased if you could keep in mind that each and every decision you make, produces a domino effect on game developers, marketplace content providers, video tutorial/book authors, as well as thousands of other professionals who invest time and money in Unreal Engine related content development.
Kind Regards,
I have no issues making anything glow, be colored like, or otherwise be just how it was before the change. While Maximum-Dev pointed out that it is indeed tedious to update to the new changes… I just can’t understand why people aren’t willing to evolve with changes. Welcome, industry standard changes, at that. Moving forward, not having to worry about whether our color will look okay on this monitor or that TV or HMD is a godsend in my opinion. If we have to deal with this little speedbump now, rock on. Let’s hit it going 20 miles over the speed limit.
I’ve ported all my projects over to the new tonemapper and it was a lot of work. But, hey, welcome to the real world of development and design. Things change, and quite often some of those changes break things and we have to fix them. We still have the option of reverting back to an older version of the engine if it’s that serious. Waaaay back to 4.14. That being said, my projects using the new tonemapper definitely have a noticeable visual flair about them, and it feels like we have more control over everything. Especially on a calibrated HDR monitor. Even on a basic SDR monitor, things look sweet.
Any projects that I want to emulate the old style of artistic bloom, I slap a console command in my master controller “r.TonemapperFilm 0”. Boom, looks just like it did before the changes. Maximum-Dev and I’m sure others have a valid reason to be upset, in that they are developing assets that are based on a certain color space and it isn’t feasible for them to take the time to go and update all their assets for their end users, because it would take time and work.
I know I keep sounding like an Epic fan-boy perhaps, rushing to their defense on this matter. But it’s not that. It’s more of a “Seriously guys? Are you new to this world? Learn to adapt or be left behind”. I feel for who is affected by this, but… I dunno. Not sure how to put it. I’m thinking it’s more of a personal thing for me? I just had to listen to someone complain about BSP going away the other day, because their whole project is based on it. “Dude, just lock in your engine version”.
They said they will get rid of this option eventually.
Just because there are changes, doesn’t mean we all should just simply go “oh okay” with them. Noone is really asking for new tonemapper to go away. We are all well aware that others need such a way of handling tonemapper and we respect that.
What we are mostly worried is that, there is simply no way to get the old bloom now. Any game that relies on neon lights are in a hopeless situation, or eventually will when Epic Games removes the old tonemapper completely, making that little command line useless.
And locking your engine is not always the best option. No engine version is bug free. For example 4.14 and 4.15 has child actors having their values reset with literally no reason and extremely random. What if they fix the problem in 4.16? You see, the bugfixes are not coming for every version which isn’t a logical thing to do in the first place.
Also, this is not a simply “oh update your assets to new look” thing. There isn’t really a good way to update to get the old bloom, you can’t even get close it. I don’t mind working for hours to get what I want, me and people like me working years to achieve even a little thing, but this Tonemapper decision came too quick, without asking any opinion of us, the developers in the first place.
TLDR: Noone’s crying about new changes. They are crying for losing the old tonemapper that some need as it will be deleted at some point.