Dev Diary 2
Added 2021-03-16 22:01:01 +0000 UTCHey!
It's time for the second dev diary. This time I'm going to talk about image manipulation, or in simpler terms - how to fix up ugly image.
So when working on 0.1.4 Alice's, 🤔hmm.. funny scene😏. Her hair were going through her skin. I didn't notice it initially, but when I did the question surfaced. What to do?
Of course I could just redo the scene with this little thing changed, but is it worth it? Take a few hours to rerender the scene when there are some hard to notice artifacts in a few renders?
Nah, it's not worth it, but then how to fix the problem? Just ignore it? That's not a good option too.
So there remains one option, post processing. Not exactly like the one in real-time graphics games, but similar. So I launched paint .NET and removed the artifacts. Does it sound like something that'll make it look weird or bad?
Pfft..🤣 If you said yes then you should believe more in my capability. Here is the effect:
While I admit if that by looking closely you'll see the changed place, you should remember that it's a very zoomed-in image, though. In-game it will be 30-40 times smaller.
Talking about post processing. Antialiasing is bad in studio, especially when doing 4K renders. 😞
Can you see all these edges? All these single bad pixels? I can, I have my 4K monitor set to 100% sharpness🧐. It hurts my eyes🤕. To fix this I created the system of ffmpeg and Windows scripts to batch auto-apply various post processing actions and effects.
This is the effect:
I also apply heavy blur effect sometimes:
Well, this image doesn't need it. So I'll stay with lighter blur. Here's the comparison on in-game images:
No blur:
Light blur:
Heavy blur:
Is there even a difference😕? Of course there is. When looking at these images full screen in 4K resolution, the difference is obvious. In 1080p version the difference is also obvious on full screen, or as you prefer in-game. Light blur help make the images better in almost all situations when default AA isn't doing its job.
That would be all for the second dev diary. Thanks for reading!
