Ghawkins wrote: ↑Mon Jan 28, 2019 2:59 pm
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.
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!
