Hi there. I’ll be short and blunt: I’m an artist. I like old things, like historical paintings and photos. If I wanted to recreate the looks of these in a 3D space/game, it’d be no problem, as far as textures and colors go. However, the biggest issue is the lighting. Specifically, the tonemapper.
I understand that Epic strives for the absolute cutting-edge of realism, and thus utilizes the ACES Tonemapper. I get that. But in refusing to allow for other tonemappers (or, gasp, none) to be used, it hamstrings artists wanting to recreate historical looks. It also bottlenecks every artist into the same homogenous, boring, rigid “style”.
Lemme explain.
3 different portraits, 3 different time periods, roughly the same technique. They’re all considered realistic portraits, but they all have different tones, lighting, and painting style. The respective artists were all going for realism, but in their own way. They didn’t use the same palette with the same paints that were all mixed and balanced perfectly.
I don’t need ACES to dictate how I perceive color and light, my eyeballs can do that just fine. And if I’m going for a style that hasn’t been used for hundreds of years, then ACES is completely anachronistic to that. It doesn’t help me, it hinders me. Therefore, I’m proposing the engine implement the ability to choose tonemapper profiles, or to disable it. (I know you can do it with console commands, but c’mon.)