I’d suggest everyone to just watch the documentary instead of getting a catchy headline every other day blowing everything out of proportion.
Reminds me of how frequently folks get color blending wrong (using linear blending results in darker colors). Or also volume sliders (using a linear scale results in much stronger volume changes near supposedly-silent volumes).
It just looks/sounds vaguely right and then no one ever questions it…
TLDR: sRGB.
For more complex errors in rendering assumptions, consider roughness. Lambertian lighting assumes surfaces are isotropic, i.e., the same from all directions. Brightness is the cosine of the angle to the light source. It’s why a lot of old renders look like smooth plastic. To my knowledge, Oren-Nayar was the first model to get diffuse brightness right, by looking more like chalk.
Regardless of the criticism on this article, you do have to give credits for the writer actually reaching out to Birdwell, and doing at least some investigative journalism.
It’s amazing how PC Gamer are able to spin lenghty articles out of a couple of sentences from the Half-Life 2 20th Anniversary documentary. It’s the third one so far according to my own count.
