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- General - Tutorial: Forcing ambient occlusion ingame.
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AO doing it's thing on 3D grass:
It's a little over the top, but that's my own fault for using so damn much 3D grass.
For comparison, here's the same shot without the AO:
Though I have painted a bit of shading onto my Sims' skins beneath their jaws, the AO definitely adds a lot extra. It's also quite visible on her left arm.
Is it creepy if I take pictures of sleeping Sims? Well either way, you'll definitely spot the AO on their facial profiles, on Amber's shoulder, and for some reason on the pillows where their polygons meet. That's also something you might notice on some Sims if you get really close to them.
And although kind of unrelated, I took this sweet overview shot of downtown Bridgeport while looking around my world. It's actually three screenshots taken at different points during sunset, it's a multiple exposure thing. I've used this trick in the past. Other than that I didn't do anything except for adding a bit of a glowing effect on some lights.
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Far Cry 3 is a particularly egregious example, with prominent halos over objects surrounding them without accounting for actual depth.
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With ReShade you can pick which method of AO to use between SSAO, Raymarch AO, SSGI, HBAO, Raymarch HBAO, SSGI, and Raymarch HBAO, and then change things like the amount of darkening and brightening, sharpness or blurriness, how far shadowing extends, depth cutoffs to ignore small geometry, etc.
It's pretty damn exciting! I wrote a tutorial on how to get started with it here, although sadly it doesn't work for people using laptops with dedicated NVIDIA cards for some odd reason. (Sarry potato!)
@nitromon, would you mind explaining to me what these bolded settings do:
setting $High
prop $ConfigGroup ShadowMapSize 2048
prop $ConfigGroup RenderShadowsEnabled true
prop $ConfigGroup InteriorLightProbeCount 1
prop $ConfigGroup LowDetailLightmaps true
prop $ConfigGroup ShadowColorFormatWorkaround $intelShadowColorFix
prop $ConfigGroup HighRezTranslucency false
@blakegriplingph in ReShade's HBAO there's a setting for that depth problem you mentioned. "fHBAOAttenuation: Affects the HBAO range, prevents shadowing of very far objects which are close in screen space."
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Shadows cut off an annoyingly short distance when the camera is close to the ground- and yet show up perfectly fine in neigbourhood view.
For instance, notice how the buildings in the midground have no shadows being cast. This makes objects from far away look flat and featureless- this is my #1 complaint about the game graphics at this moment in time.
Same here- the shadows fade out halfway through the building.
I wonder if there might be any sort of file in the Game Data or GraphicRules that might control the camera/shadow cut off parameters. I know that there are XML files that control the cameras, there must be a XML file here or there that controls the shadows as well.
Perhaps as a first question- where are the Game XMLs stored?
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It's a damn shame, and it sucks, but I've tried to decompile the game's shader data and haven't gotten very far at all. So I suspect it will require much further investigation than anyone has done so far.
In the meantime, try zooming all the way out before going into freecam. That's been known to help a lot.
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And as a fun bonus, there's also a bunch of files in there that control certain visual aspects of the worlds. What the water surface looks like, how it refracts and reflects, how the trees are animated and other fun stuff like that.
If you want to edit the freecam, try VideoCamera.ini.
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I.e. this one here changes the camera itself via XML values:
http://simulis.blogspot.ca/2011/12/about-peepshow.html
I wonder if the XML files are buried inside the actual game package files.
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All the INI files I've edited have kept their _INI designation in the package.
@igazor @Lyralei
Do you know a bit more about this?
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It's interesting that there are INIs to change the camera fade and GraphicRules.sgr to change things like shadow quality, texture sizes and view distance. Then there are some XML files that change the camera settings itself.
I'm really hoping there are some settings that change change when shadows are cut off- it's not that the game can't do it (if you zoom out with the camera, the shadow do become longer as well as in neighbourhood view), but that there are rules artificially constraining this.
EyePatch_CameraMod_2012-04-01.zip (6.3 KB, 29 downloads) - View custom content | ||||||||||
8405 2017-11-10 18:09 EyePatch_CameraMod_2012-04-01.package --------- ------- 8405 1 file |
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Which... seems to be a throwback of your thread Sorry...
Anyways! I do however know that (and you might have been confused by that) That camera settings for generating in-game thumbnails, and a few other camera related stuff are INI files inside the Deltabuild (or fullbuild). However I don't think that will help regarding finding out about the sunshadows since these are indeed render based and I can understand that those can only be found in the engine settings which... I guess no one really have been able to open it up.
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If that were done, and if it would enable us to modify the game's shader data, the potential would be very significant.
And you're right, there's a few more INIs in the DeltaBuild/FullBuild that I forgot about. There's a value in there somewhere that lets you change the colour of the top of walls, which for some reason can't be done in-game.
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