High Dynamic Range Rendering - History

History

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.

In gaming applications, Riven: The Sequel to Myst in 1997 used an HDRI postprocessing shader directly based on Spencer's paper. After E³ 2003, Valve Software released a demo movie of their Source engine rendering a cityscape in a high dynamic range. The term was not commonly used again until E³ 2004, where it gained much more attention when Valve Software announced Half-Life 2: Lost Coast and Epic Games showcased Unreal Engine 3, coupled with open-source engines such as OGRE 3D and open-source games like Nexuiz.