Hi!
I'm ghostinthecamera - I take photos in games...apparently this is a thing called 'virtual photography'. Being a huge battlestar galactica fan, i stumbled across BSG deadlock. Needless to say, I love it! Furthermore, the game's replay function has tools that provide freedom to take photos. There are a few tweaks that i had to make to be able to take these shots but I wanted to share them here so I hope you enjoy them. I've downscaled them to 1080p for forum use, but they were originally taken at 8k (7680x4320)
Some of my favourites:
Screenshots! BSG Photos
-
- Private First Class - Wehrmacht Inf
- Posts: 7
- Joined: Thu Jan 24, 2019 6:31 pm
-
- Private First Class - Wehrmacht Inf
- Posts: 7
- Joined: Thu Jan 24, 2019 6:31 pm
-
- Private First Class - Wehrmacht Inf
- Posts: 7
- Joined: Thu Jan 24, 2019 6:31 pm
-
- Private First Class - Wehrmacht Inf
- Posts: 7
- Joined: Thu Jan 24, 2019 6:31 pm
-
- Senior Corporal - Ju 87G
- Posts: 88
- Joined: Thu Dec 31, 2015 6:18 am
Re: Screenshots! BSG Photos
Beautiful shots.
-
- Corporal - Strongpoint
- Posts: 61
- Joined: Mon Jul 31, 2017 10:24 pm
Re: Screenshots! BSG Photos
These should be considered as actual loading screens in the game, with your permission of course! Great Work!
-
- Private First Class - Wehrmacht Inf
- Posts: 7
- Joined: Thu Jan 24, 2019 6:31 pm
Re: Screenshots! BSG Photos
If this happened i would actually be overjoyed beyond belief! Thank you for thinking they are good enough to use as loading screens!fisher2000 wrote: ↑Sat Jan 26, 2019 4:48 pm These should be considered as actual loading screens in the game, with your permission of course! Great Work!
Thank you very much!
Re: Screenshots! BSG Photos
They are indeed awesome. I'm wondering how you made these, since all screenshots I ever take are pretty... meh, even if I try to get some adjustments in.
The aforementioned post is made in accordance with the canon where the Valkyrie-class is a modern battlestar which has no place in the first Cylon War timeline. So say we all.
-
- Private First Class - Wehrmacht Inf
- Posts: 7
- Joined: Thu Jan 24, 2019 6:31 pm
Re: Screenshots! BSG Photos
Thank you kindly!
Happy to share my process:
Firstly, while the camera in the replay functionality is great, it lacks control around 2 crucial things: Field of VIew and Camera Height. Its possible to move the camera, forward, back, left and right and stop time. It is also possible to "zoom" but the way the camera is implemented in the replay feature means that this isnt a zoom in the sense of changing the field of view. Rather, the camera is physically moved closer to its target object with no change in the field of view.
To that end, I used some software to find out where the Field of View and camera height values are stored in the games memory so that i could manipulate them (as there is no in game functionality to do so). Now with control over the FoV and the height of the camera, I have the appropriate tools to take photos.
Second - I use reshade to apply certain affects in game. The main thing I use reshade for is depth of field. This is the last piece in having the right tools to take good photos. I'll list the reshade features i use:
1) SMAA - This is Enhanced Subpixel Morphological Antialiasing - basically AA because the game currently lacks any kind of AA implementation. Smoothing out those jaggies (even at 4k!)
2) FXAA - This is Fast Approximate Antialiasing. Another AA filter to assist SMAA in removing jaggies
3) Adaptive Sharpening - The image can become a tad soft using aggressive SMAA and FXAA so this brings back some sharpness to the image.
4) Ambient Light - While the lighting is really quite good in the game engine, this shader generates a realistic sense of ambient light in space driven by existing light objects (it also has a lens flare effect which is quite handy)
5) MXAO - An Ambient Occlusion shader based on SSAO. As the game lacks ambient occlusion, this shader adds in an SSAO based occlusion. Ambient Occlusion is essentially the shadows that are created where two physical objects meet (i.e. room corners, feet and the ground). This helps add a bit more depth to the battlestars and ships
6) CinematicDoF - The most important one - is the depth of field shader. Driven by the game's depth buffer, this allows me to have depth of field in my shots
I should note, that I only play with adaptive sharpening, Ambient Light. MXAO is quite intensive at the highest settings and causes fps drops. Cinematic DoF will cause sub-30fps at the highest settings and it is only activated when composing a shot
Thirdly - once the shot is ready i use Simple Runtime Window Editor (SRWE) to increase render resolution to 8k temporarily to take the shot. This is known as 'hotsampling' - briefly increasing render resolution for a capture. This aids further in removing aliasing, as the higher the resolution the less jagged edges. Furthermore, it will allow me to have a sharper and cleaner image at the end of the process when i downsample to 4k using a lancsoz3 algorithm.
I use the nvidia experience overlay to capture as it captures directly from the framebuffer to png.
The next step is to import my pictures into my photography workflow (i am a real life photographer too!). So the photos will be imported into Lightroom in order to make some adjustments. The various space environments are truly beautiful, but I always like to tweak the white balance, colours etc to obtain a specific feel i am going for.
Then I downsample all edited shots from 8k to 4k using lancsoz3 as i stated above.
Jeez - writing it all out makes it sound like a really involved process! I think the most involved parts were finding the FoV and Camera Height and editing can be involved. Taking shots is the most enjoyable part!
And that is the general process!