High-dynamic-range Rendering in Floored's Luma Engine

https://secure.meetupstatic.com/photos/event/8/e/4/b/600_463596427.jpeg

A critical drawback of standard, low-dynamic-range rendering is that details are lost in scenes with widely-varying light intensities. Dark areas appear black and bright areas appear washed out. High-dynamic-range (HDR) rendering (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-dynamic-range_rendering) involves performing lighting calculations using a wider range of light intensities and then using techniques such as tone mapping (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tone_mapping) to ensure that detail isn't lost.

Floored (http://www.floored.com/homepage/) (now part of CBRE (https://www.cbre.com/)) specializes in interactive visualizations of real-estate, which require rendering that mimics reality as closely as possible. Their physically-based WebGL engine, Luma, leverages high-dynamic-range rendering to capture the wide range of lighting conditions present in the spaces they model, from sunlight to interior fixtures. Angela Wei and Lars Hamre of Floored will present an introduction to HDR rendering, and discuss how they leverage it in Luma to significantly improve visual quality.

Angela Wei (https://twitter.com/fly_awei) and Lars Hamre (https://twitter.com/chemecse) are Software Engineers at Floored, where they are developing the WebGL rendering engine, Luma.