High-dynamic-range rendering

High-dynamic-range rendering (HDRR or HDR rendering), also known as high-dynamic-range lighting, is the rendering of computer graphics scenes by using lighting calculations done in high dynamic range (HDR). This allows preservation of details that may be lost due to limiting contrast ratios. Video games and computer-generated movies and special effects benefit from this as it creates more realistic scenes than with the more simplistic lighting models used.

Graphics processor company Nvidia summarizes the motivation for HDR in three points: bright things can be really bright, dark things can be really dark, and details can be seen in both.

The use of high-dynamic-range imaging (HDRI) in computer graphics was introduced by Greg Ward in 1985 with his open-source Radiance rendering and lighting simulation software which created the first file format to retain a high-dynamic-range image. HDRI languished for more than a decade, held back by limited computing power, storage, and capture methods. Not until recently has the technology to put HDRI into practical use been developed.

In 1990, Nakame, et al., presented a lighting model for driving simulators that highlighted the need for high-dynamic-range processing in realistic simulations.

In 1995, Greg Spencer presented Physically-based glare effects for digital images at SIGGRAPH, providing a quantitative model for flare and blooming in the human eye.

In 1997 Paul Debevec presented Recovering high dynamic range radiance maps from photographs at SIGGRAPH and the following year presented Rendering synthetic objects into real scenes. These two papers laid the framework for creating HDR light probes of a location and then using this probe to light a rendered scene.

HDRI and HDRL (high-dynamic-range image-based lighting) have, ever since, been used in many situations in 3D scenes in which inserting a 3D object into a real environment requires the lightprobe data to provide realistic lighting solutions.

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