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Rendermonkey? Nooo! Photomonkey!!!

Name:	Phil Carlisle
Date Posted:	Apr 21, 2006
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In case your using TSE and have gotten into doing full-screen effects, I thought I'd post a quick snippet of an idea I tried the other night to pretty good effect.

In order to try out full screen effects, you dont need to use RenderMonkey or FXComposer! noooo! what do you need?

PHOTOSHOP!

Let me demonstrate.

Here is the image of one of our cockpits in Air Ace.

Now lets say we wanted to play with a bloom filter in game, but before we do, we want to see how it would look?

Well, fire up photoshop and paste the sucker in there!

Now you can do this the cheap way, or the better way. To do it the cheap way, load up the "image effects" action set and click on "soft edge glow" action and run it.

Voila! bloom!

Ok, it might not be bloomy for your tastes, so better to do it by hand. For bloom, simply duplicate the base layer, apply a gaussian filter, then choose lighten for the layer and set it to 80% opacity and merge down with the original! Try it with different blur filter kernels, try it with different modes instead of lighten! hell, go mad!! This works for all sorts of full screen processing effects.

Basically, if you think about it, you can do any sort of image processing effects trials in photoshop using its layers to test out ideas (better night vision for instance?) and then directly take that knowledge and have an easier time coding it because you know exactly what operations are required and in what order!

I never thought of photoshop as a shader/rendering tool like this before, but it makes perfect sense!

Anyway, I'm off to play with some more filters!

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Todd Pickens (Apr 21, 2006 at 22:48 GMT)

:O)

Good stuff Phil.

Anton Bursch (Apr 21, 2006 at 23:59 GMT)

I like it!!!

Adrian Tysoe (Apr 22, 2006 at 00:48 GMT)

heh sounds like a good idea, I'm going to have to try it with the postFX compositors in our engine. Would certainly make it easy for me to figure whats going on if I can test the idea in Photoshop first :).

Rubes (Apr 22, 2006 at 02:20 GMT)

Damn, that's one fantastic looking cockpit. Nice work.

Alex Resendes (Apr 22, 2006 at 03:07 GMT)

The idea of using PS for testing out filters is a good one, but I think you should consider not using bloom. Bloom is way overdone these days. It has become the new lens flare for devs. The effect should be reserved for fantasy games and games with a "dreamy" feel (eg. Fable, PoP).

Anthony Fullmer (Apr 22, 2006 at 06:09 GMT)

haha, looks nice Phil - I am sure it will look even better in the engine.

Nauris Krauze (Apr 22, 2006 at 09:18 GMT)

yay, Photoshop for teh win! ;)
err... yeah :)

Phil Carlisle (Apr 22, 2006 at 09:57 GMT)

Alex: exactly.. which is why I'm going to over-use it as much as possible!! :)

Vashner (Apr 22, 2006 at 13:58 GMT)

It looks good...

Logan Foster (Apr 22, 2006 at 17:56 GMT)

Actually Phil I tend to take what you have done a step further like so:

1. Duplicate your image layer
2. Desaturate the layer so that it is only a black & white image
3. Set white as the foreground colour and make a selection via colour. Adjust the selection slider variance to grab as much white as possible. Press OK
4. Press CTRL + J to a do copy selection to a new layer.
5. You should now have your white pixels as its own layer. Hide the desaturated black & white layer that you made previously. Apply a Guasian blur and adjust the layer opacity as you need it.

That will give you a more natural specular bloom like you will see within TSE since its based more on lighting values and angles.

Phil Carlisle (Apr 23, 2006 at 08:29 GMT)

Hmm, will have to try that.

I guess my bloom was more a soft sheen :)

Vashner (Apr 23, 2006 at 17:29 GMT)

Ok but how are you going to replicate it in TSE? By twinking materials properties?

James Thompson (Apr 24, 2006 at 16:24 GMT)

Phil: Could your next blog please have something about the AI Pack?
We are working out times and dates and so need to know roughly when the AI Pack will be out (months
or years)

Cockpit looks great btw nice work :)

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