I’m starting up on pre-production on a new project. One of the things I’ve been asked to do is explore/expand on the HDR rendering we did for Red Faction: Guerrilla. In RF:G we had an HDR renderer, but still used SDR source imagery. This caused some problems later in the dev cycle as we tried to color balance and light adjust the game because:
the source images were not HDR (only problematic on some materials), the source images were not lighting color neutral (some assumed light color was apparent in the diffuse maps), and, the source images were authored and saved in 2.2 gamma corrected space.
The first problem was only a problem on certain texture types, like the skydome and reflection maps. We’re thinking of solving that this time around by using HDR imagery for some, but not all, of our textures. The second issue can be handled easily with artist training and communication. The third issue is a big ball of suck that ate up multiple months of my life last year as we were trying to strap an HDR renderer on top of a bunch of already authored gamma corrected textures, and then hoping we could easily color balance all of it. While we are happy with what we have achieved, the process was painful and clunkly.
This time around I was wondering if it would be better to force the artists to work in linear color space in Photoshop. Has anyone else tried a linear color space workflow on a game? If so, would you be willing to share successes and failures you experienced, please?