After working on shader programming for the Deferred Lighting and Post-processing Effects demos, I decided it was in my interest to continue expanding my knowledge of shader and graphics programming. As such, I chose to investigate and implement HDR rendering techniques in my engine and extended the demo from the previous terms. The culmination of this research was a technical demo which allows the user to preview each pass of HDR rendering using my current engine framework: a DirectX rendering architecture using DirectX HLSL pixel shaders written in the .fx file format.

The demo combined the work of the previous 2 focus studies (Deferred Shading, and Post-processing Effects) and added a basic implementation of HDR Lighting.

A much better version of HDR lighting was implemented in my team game project, Kompressor, which included improved tone mapping, adaptive luminance, and the calculation of average scene luminance. The version implemented in my own engine used a cheaper per-pixel luminance calculation instead of the average luminance for the entire scene and provides a less robust tone mapping due to time constraints.