Steel Hunters - Color-Grading/Post-Stack Tuning

This post was originally posted at its lovely home on Joy Machine's website. Check it out some time <3

Generally, I do all of my game work on my primary monitor (Dell 27″ S2716DG) which I’ve run through a couple of color/brightness/etc. calibration tools. I have not done the same for my under-resolution — due to outputting to multiple displays from a laptop — Samsung 32″ (S32D850T). That monitor has not received the same love, since it’s already not running its intended resolution, so I figure it’s a lost cause until I can build a proper desktop computer.

That said, it’s a great test for a more “common” monitor display setup, as outside of the art/design/game development/film industries, there aren’t a whole lot of people with properly-calibrated displays.

Steel Hunters was basically 20% barely-discernible black color output, and that was in a still image, much less during gameplay. Though gameplay would have the benefit of dynamic lights illuminating the area (potentially).

Anyway. I wanted to fix that. So, because I needed a new article on this site (or so I’m told by the team), I decided to make this project my article. And also my way to not just blindly tweak post values because: A) I needed reasoning for this article, B) I have a tendency to just continue the cycle of tuning to my primary monitor.

An attempt to solve both these problems is to just define a bookmarked position in-editor (so if it crashes, I don’t lose this reference point) which has a complex scene composition — a wide variety of exposure values — and balance iteratively and take notes every step of the way. And a screen shot of each annotated iteration from the same bookmarked perspective at 2x editor resolution, which ends up being 3722×2656.

All of this arose entirely out of playing Ghost Recon: Wildlands for a week straight and then binging Metal Gear Solid 5: Phantom Pain upon realizing that I never got anywhere even close to completing it. The most striking difference between the two games, which sounds negligible at first, is how they handle scene lighting at night. In Wildlands, the scene is barely visible at night if you’re not actively in a lit area (through spotlights, car headlights, streetlights, etc.). I assumed initially (and the resulting conclusion doesn’t negate this) that my, somewhat ironically, completely uncalibrated television display near a window lacking proper blackout curtains was the cause of this. But playing in the same conditions over the course of no-it’s-not-important-how-many-hours-were-spent-on-these two days of MGS5, it became clear that this may have actually been a design decision.

Spoilers: benefit of the doubt tossed in  Wildlands‘s general direction may be wrongly-placed. RESULTS IN THE ARTICLE CONCLUSION!

Granted, it also ended up taking about five times as long as it would have otherwise. C’est la vie.

STARTING POINT: POST_WORK_ITER_00

All items to follow have been changed in a later iteration, based on this starting point, so here are their original values for posterity.

ITERATION: POST_WORK_ITER_01

Generally trying to improve dimly-lit/heavily-shadowed area visibility, while also tweaking the results of the bloom a bit as it’s in the stack and doing things, just nothing really of note.

Trying to alter the tonemapping curve (which is to set to “filmic” in UE4, which I believe is ACES) to expose the dimly-lit areas rather than just tweaking the color grading values themselves — as those are applied later in the post stack and degrade overall composition quality.

CHANGED THIS ITERATION