Dev log #3 | Render quality improvements


Sup!

I almost can't believe it's already the third Dev log I'm writing, but here we are! I'll list out how things are going first, then you can read my additional yapping if you're interested in some technical stuff, with comparison renders to show render quality changes towards the end.

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  • Minor changes to all love interests – honestly, they're barely noticeable but I stare at the characters for so long, I have to do it for my own sanity's sake if I notice an imperfection.
  • 11 out of 24 scenes edited (had some significant changes in some scenes).
  • Started working on 1 new location, adding detail.
  • Made a fully custom image viewer software that I can use to do my post-work on each render in a fully-automated way, while allowing me to push the quality of each render significantly higher (more on this later if you are interested in technical details).
  • My "lore work" has been going well, but I still have some work to do. While I expected to cut back on the number of words I had for these documents from 57k, currently I'm up at 63k words while organizing, removing redundant information, fine-tuning things and adding new lore and history.
    • It may seem slow, but I'm studying and working with some complex concepts and theories while doing my best to keep Aether's universe fresh and unique.
    • In most recent times I have been focusing on important elements of the history of the universe. I designed these elements a while ago but haven’t added enough detail to them yet, so I've been focusing on that and also ensuring the underlying logic is solid from all angles. I've also started working on a certain part of the universe's history, which for now will stay a secret and will be revealed later - it's a pretty big one to say the least and I've never done anything like this before.

  • Started preliminary work for rendering.
  • Ported my very first assets successfully from Unreal Engine – while there are already loads of assets available courtesy of the amazing modding community, learning this process is something that's opening up the freedom and chance for more unique assets to be used in Aether. I will keep learning and perfecting the process, but I intend to push the limits as much as schedule allows and get the best assets for each scene.


Yes, I did go into these 2 weeks wanting to focus on lore and I ended doing mostly technical stuff, one nerd won over the other this time. Overall, I'm a bit happier with these 2 weeks' progress, but I know I can do better. It's still early days and I'm refining my workflow and seeing what works and what doesn’t. There's still plenty to do, but I'm confident in every single aspect of work left to do for the Prologue, even if my original schedule seems to be rather tight at this point.

If you are only interested in render quality comparisons you can go to the bottom of this post, if you're also interested in the technical stuff regarding render quality, continue reading (be warned for a yap session).

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I've been using ReShade for HS2 for almost two years now. Back then there were many limitations on how the internal screenshot engine of the studio worked and also because of my PC being lower specs, the opportunity I could get with ReShade basically just being a screen capture would speed up the actual rendering process. While I'm not using 50 different shaders, I spent days understanding what each shader does and put together a preset in ReShade that I've used ever-since, and it was specifically designed so a 1080p render could look somewhat better – considering I have a 1080p monitor, that's the resolution I can capture at with ReShade.

In pursuit of wanting to making my renders higher quality, I spent some time digging and testing. Since then, I realized I could use DSR with Nvidia and I can upscale my monitor to 1440p or 4K and capture at those resolutions, however my FPS is abysmal then and makes work an actual nightmare, bordering impossible. Considering, how now we have the Screenshot Manager plugin that allows for amazing upscaling and various other solutions to increase quality while keeping FPS in the studio much better, I was tempted to make the move over, however that meant I'd be losing my ReShade preset. Additionally, I can't push things with Screenshot Manager too much, otherwise my PC just crashes because of not enough VRAM – so that required testing and fine-tuning, but it also made me question if it would really be worth it, after all it seemed like I may gain some but also lose some.


I knew that if I could use Screenshot Manager to capture renders, which easily upscales to 1440p or even 4K (no more 1080p renders), and then apply my ReShade preset in post then I could keep the same visual style I've had while having higher resolution and higher quality renders. At first, I attempted to recreate my shaders in Photoshop and drop ReShade completely… that was a failure.


So, then I went through about 10 different pieces of software that I could use to view images and see if I could get ReShade to hook into it to apply my preset. The reason why it's difficult is because ReShade wants to hook into a game's rendering pipeline normally (DirectX, OpenGL or Vulkan). It needs a continuously rendering 3D application, not a static image viewer. Most image viewers load the image for like one frame and stop rendering (the screen either goes black or the image stays but the renderer stopped), hence ReShade either applies stuff for that one frame or just ignores it completely. After running through all those software and having all sorts of different problems, I did what any sane person would do (I know, I'm crazy) and made my own image viewer software with Python that actually uses an OpenGL window (via pyglet) and continuously calls every frame, even with a static image, so ReShade can work with it without any issues (I also made an Image viewer with C++ to do some testing first, but then moved over to Python).


There were multiple challenges, including input being rejected by ReShade to actually capture each render, window size vs internal render resolution differences as I was technically upscaling, so ReShade, which is just capturing via screen captures, is able to capture an actual 4K image and not just my monitor at 1080p. I also had all sorts of interaction quirks with pyglet + ReShade, creating a large borderless window on a smaller monitor, OpenGL context initialization order, and VAO/vertex buffer state all interacted with ReShade in odd ways, causing constant black/white screens, ReShade not hooking into the image viewer or straight up crashes or a frozen window.


Now that you have been adequately exhausted I can finally get to the point: I managed to make it work and I can feed the software 4K renders, and it automatically applies my ReShade preset to each render and captures them in 4K – meaning that I can use the power of the Screenshot Manager plugin in the studio while applying the same post-FX that I've always used (although in this whole process I did tweak them quite a bit).


There is a whole story about me having a nervous breakdown when I realized my monitor wasn’t set to sRGB and so the colors might be messed up on other people's monitors, leading to their screens displaying my renders differently and them potentially looking awful, but let's skip that… let's just say I went through a lot of tuning and trying to figure out how I'd need to change things so my visual style stays the same and people aren’t getting flashbanged by colors on their screen if their saturation is turned up to the stratosphere (when I already use higher saturation levels). As I said, I ended up slightly adjusting visuals with my shaders, but the big thing is that after lots of testing I know the limits of mc PC when it comes to rendering with the Screenshot Manager plugin and so the quality that I can get out of the studio, while also applying the same post-FX, is much better than before.

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Comparisons:
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The Before renders were captured at 1080p with ReShade's screen capture, while the After renders are 4K renders captured via the Screenshot Manager plugin, then added my post-FX, and were then downscaled to 1080p.

There are a lot of small, fine details where you see the differences, so if you're interested, you can find these in the Discord server in high quality and analyze them to your hearts' content.


-Khronarch