#reshade mxao

[pictureamoebae]

Whoa whoa whoa. Different anon but I could actually use your new reshade in 3.0.8? :o that would be everything!

Sure. The best way to do it would be to backup your 3.0.8 shaders (just rename the folder to something different, you can leave it where it is - maybe to reshade-shaders-308), and download the 3.4.1 shaders and put them in your Bin folder (and then follow the rest of my install instructions, wrt quint and my replacement/extra shaders.

You can try it with the 3.0.8 shaders anyway but if there are any little differences in how they’re written it might mean something doesn’t quite look as it should (but like I said the only real difference I can think of is with the rewritten mxao shader — I made Hazy Days and Blueberryade with 3.0.8 and upgraded to 3.4.1 and all I had to do was tweak mxao, the rest looked identical).

ReShade the tool and individual shaders are different things that work together, created by different people. A good rule of thumb is that as long as you stay within the same major version (so, any 3.x version, or any 4.x version) the shaders written for one minor revision (let’s say 3.0.8) will work with any other minor revision (for example with 3.4.1).

Nothing major is happening to ReShade the tool during minor revisions, just bug fixes and the odd feature update. The big changes happen between major revisions — the change from 2 to 3 was massive - the entire language and directory structure was rewritten; the change from 3 to 4 was less of an upheaval, and shaders will in theory work between them but need some adjusting sometimes, so I wouldn’t recommend mixing them unless you know what you’re doing — I’m using some 4.x shaders with 3.4.1 at the moment in my personal build of Clear Bloom, and I had to edit a few things in the shader code to make it work but nothing major, just the way the sliders work when tweaking values.

Shaders, however, get rewritten whenever a shader author fancies. That can be mid-version, or it can coincide with a major version revision of ReShade the tool. Marty McFly in particular frequently makes changes to his shaders, always trying to improve them. Most of the time you won’t notice the difference, but sometimes it’ll be a bigger rewrite. That’s what happened with mxao at some point between 3.0.8 and 3.4.1. He could have not rewritten it and it still would have worked with 3.4.1. Or he could have rewritten it while we were on version 3.0.6 and it would have worked just as it does in 3.4.1. The ReShade version is immaterial because all 3.x versions work the same in terms of shader language and implementation.

The problems came when people were making presets with 3.0.8, updating to 3.4.1 and noticing that mxao didn’t look the same anymore. That wasn’t because of anything fundamental to ReShade, but because Marty rewrote mxao, which he could have done anytime, it just happened to be then. I think people’s unfamiliarity with how ReShade actually works led to lots of worry and concern and big statements like “ONLY COMPATIBLE WITH 3.0.8”, which in turn made people who use presets but don’t create them think there was something integral to each version of ReShade the tool that tied a specific preset to it.

Anyway, that’s a lot of words just to say any 3.x shader will work with any 3.x version, and that when it comes to mxao try to stick to the version of the shader the preset used when being created so it’ll look the same, but otherwise just chuck the shaders in and have fun.

[pictureamoebae]

Hello!! mxao wont work for me in reshade. I tried your suggestion about fixing the reshade depth buffer and it still didnt change. Basically, when i move around the sliders under mxao nothing changes. I toggle it on and off and everything looks the same. :\ i have the latest reshade which is 4.3.0. Thank you!!

Hi there! I’m sorry you’re having problems with this.

I haven’t used 4.3 so I don’t know if something has fundamentally changed, but a couple of things to try:

When you changed the ‘reversed’ line in the preprocessor definitions to ‘0’ did you press ‘reload’ afterwards? You need to do that for the changes to take effect. (I’m presuming 4.3 still has a reload button.)

Have you turned off Edge Smoothing in the game’s graphics settings? Depth effects like MXAO won’t work while that is turned on.

To check that the depth buffer is working correctly toggle on the Display Depth shader while you’re outdoors in the game. The screen should turn black and white with no detail, only the shapes of things. It should go from black in the foreground to white in the distance. It should look a little like this (this pic isn’t from TS4):

If you see something like this then the depth buffer is working correctly. If the screen is all black or all white it isn’t working as it should.

It’s important to do this outdoors because sometimes there isn’t a lot of depth definition in interior spaces in the game so you might not be able to see if it’s working correctly or not. Doing it outdoors ensures you have a lot of different models/meshes at different distances all the way to the sky in the far distance (which should be white).

If your screen looks like this while Display Depth is turned on then we know the depth buffer is set up correctly, and if MXAO still isn’t working the problem lies elsewhere.

If your screen goes from white in the foreground to black in the distance the depth buffer is still reversed so you need to double check you set the preprocessor definition correctly (and hit Reload).

If the screen is all black or all white there’s a more fundamental problem with ReShade not detecting the depth buffer and we’d have to do more in-depth troubleshooting.

So follow the steps above, remembering to make sure Edge Smoothing is turned off, and see what happens and what the Display Depth is telling you. If it’s still not working we can move forward from there. Reading the release notes for 4.3 they did change something to do with the depth buffer detection but like I said I haven’t tried that version yet so I don’t know if it’s broken in TS4 or not. If you’re still having no luck I’ll download 4.3 later and take a look for myself.

[pictureamoebae]

your clear bloom reshade is so making me want to switch to 3.4.1 and leave 3.0.8 waay behind. It's so pretty and nice!!

Aw, that’s a lovely thing to say, thank you anon!

The only real difference between 3.0.8 and 3.4.1 is mxao, which got a big rewrite some time in between those versions. But here’s the thing, if you want you can ditch the 3.4.1 version of mxao and copy over the 3.0.8 version instead. It’ll work as it did in 3.0.8. If you were doing that with Clear Bloom you’d have to get rid of my mxao files and create your own settings, but mxao is a bit of a personal thing anyway and people have their own preferences, so many are tweaking it to their own liking anyway.

Incidentally, you can use the newer 3.4.1 mxao in 3.0.8 too if you want. It doesn’t matter. There’s no difference between 3.0.8 and 3.4.1 in terms of what shaders will work with either version — if a shader works with 3.0.8 it will work with 3.4.1 and vice versa.

[pictureamoebae]

Hey there! Reshade question! I was just wondering if you could tell me what the big differences are between 3.0.8 and 3.4.1. that makes it so that 3.0.8. presets can't be used in 3.4.1? Is there a way to maybe tweak older presets to make them compatible to 3.4.1? I'm currently (happily) using your Clear Bloom preset by the way, it's absolutely wonderful and gorgeous. Thanks SO MUCH for making and sharing it. You are a true blessing to the community

Hi there! I’m so happy you like Clear Bloom!!!

The main difference is the MXAO shader was rewritten, so if your preset uses MXAO those values will need to be tweaked if you want it to look the same.

So warnings of ‘not compatible with’ are overblown, it just means ‘you’ll need to change some MXAO settings’.

I created Hazy Days and Blueberryade with 3.0.8 but I use it quite happily with 3.4.1 and have done since 3.4.1 came out.

A good rule of thumb is that any preset made in a 3.x version will be compatible with any other 3.x version (likewise those made within 2.x with any other 2.x, and any within 4.x with any other 4.x), but some individual shader values may need to be tweaked if there were rewrites of shaders by particular shader authors during that time.

But see, a shader author can rewrite their shader at any time, so it’s possible you could be using, let’s say 4.3 and Marty McFly goes and rewrites MXAO again and all of a sudden, even though you’re still using 4.3 it doesn’t look the same any more. That’s because shaders and ReShade are two separate things that work together, maintained by different people.

ReShade is the tool. It’s the thing that allows us to inject shaders into our game. Without ReShade the shaders don’t work. It sets out the language shaders can use, and the framework for letting them interact with our games.

Shaders are each written by different people who aren’t necessarily connected with the development of ReShade. Anyone can write a shader if they know the language. Because shaders are developed independently they are updated to a different timescale, whenever the authors want basically. New ones are developed all the time, and old ones updated and improved upon.

When using ReShade it’s important to understand how it works so you know what’s happening when you update ReShade. It’s important to keep bakcups too in case you want to revert to older versions.

Remember though, any shader written for 3.x can be used with any 3.x version. If you’re especially tied to the 3.0.8 version of MXAO you can use it in 3.4.1, just paste it over the new one.

One other thing you can run into when moving on from 3.0.8 is the depth buffer. In 3.1.1 they changed how it is calculated by default. It’s simple to change it back again if needed though, and I wrote a tutorial here.

[pictureamoebae]

Hi, sorry to ask such a thing but I was wondering if you know if it's even possible to find old mxao files? I launched my game a few months ago and it automatically installed reshade 3.4 when I usually use 3.0.8, and completely replaced my reshade shaders with the new shaders and didn't save a backup! Since that incident, my mxao was replaced with the new version and has left my shadows looking very "boxy" and "polygon". I've set my mxaosmooth_normals to 1 instead of 0, but still looks off.

Hi there,

There was a change to the MXAO shader shortly after version 3.0.8, so it needs tweaking to make it look like you want (not just smoothnormals but some of the actual values too), but it still doesn’t look quite like it used to.

I wrote a tutorial about how to find old versions of shaders using the ReShade shaders github repository, but if you scroll down to the bottom you’ll see a direct link to the 3.0.8 shaders, since that’s one of the most popular versions.

I recommend always making a backup of your shaders so this doesn’t happen again. Updating ReShade will always install the latest shader pack if you say yes to downloading them. It’s good practice to keep all your old versions of ReShade and all their shaders backed up somewhere safe. I have versions going all the way back to 0.12! 

[pictureamoebae]

Anonymous said:

hey! i absolutely luv your new reshade preset so so much!!! buuuuut when i enable anything like MXAO, SSR, qUINT_MXAO or anything like that the screen goes very very dark and/or very colourful and glitchy and i don’t understand what’s going on lol. pls could u help me as i’m a reshade noob lmao (i have disabled edge smoothing)

Hi Anon! Thank you, I’m glad you like it!

First things first, check in the Preprocessor Definitions box in the Settings tab to make sure that DEPTHBUFFER_IS_REVERSED is set to 0. If it is, great. If it’s set to 1, change it to 0 and press Reload in the main Home tab.

With that out of the way, the way I use MXAO is on a shot-per-shot basis and not during normal gameplay. My settings are often quite exaggerated, and what looks good in one shot will look bloody awful in another. I left the settings kind of random in terms of AO and IL amount/strength. AO = ambient occlusion, and that’s the dark shadows. IL = indirect lighting, and that’s the colourful stuff that bounces around when you move. I change the strength of both of these depending on what looks best, but I generally play with it switched off. All the other settings, like radius and sample count are set up for you, but the AO and IL Amount settings are what you’ll want to change to suit your scene.

As for SSR, I left it with very exaggerated settings because I last used it for my Spice District rainy night pictures, and the settings had to be really very strong to get that effect. I made a tutorial on how to use SSR that you might find useful.

[pictureamoebae]

I have tried several different TS4 reshade presets and setting various settings but cannot get MXAO to work properly, there are black bars/white bars from IL stretched across the screen. I have a nvidia 1070 GTX graphics card, and I have no idea what is causing this, any ideas?

I’m sorry you’re having problems getting MXAO to work.

First thing I would check is whether you have the depth buffer set up properly or not. In versions since 3.1.1 it’s set to be reversed, but TS4 doesn’t have a reversed depth buffer, so we have to change that setting back. I made a tutorial on how to do that. It’s quick and simple to do.

Secondly, make sure to double check that Edge Smoothing is turned off in your in-game graphics settings. (Even if you’re certain it is, double check–I had someone once say it was but when they checked again it was turned on.) Edge Smoothing must be off in order for depth-based effects to work properly. Usually they just won’t work at all while it’s on, but sometimes it might cause glitches instead.

If you’ve checked both of those and are sure everything is set up as it should be, the next thing I’d check is that you have any preprocessor definitions relating to MXAO and IL set up. These settings can be edited either manually in the mxao.fx file (they are in the top-most section), or you can add them to the preprocessor definitions box (the same box you looked at when checking to see if the depth buffer was reversed). 

You can see a list of those definitions as they should look in the preprocessor definitions box at the top of this tutorial. Sometimes different versions of MXAO will have different preprocessor definitions that you can use. You can check which are applicable to your version  by looking at that top section of the mxao.fx file (found inside reshade-shaders > shaders).

If you’ve gone through these steps and you’re still having problems, please send me a screenshot of what you’re seeing in-game, and I’ll see if I can work out what might be going on.

Edit: I forgot to say, make sure Laptop Mode is also turned off in your game settings. It can interfere with MXAO.

[pictureamoebae]

Additional Optional ReShade Shaders

Marty McFly, the author of MXAO and the ADOF DoF shaders, has put out a pack of new and updated shaders. It’s called qUINT and you can download here.

Some are more up-to-date versions of shaders included in the regular ReShade download, some are entirely new. You can simply copy them over into your reshade-shaders folder and start using them as normal (if any have the same file name as current shaders, say YES when asked if you would like to copy and replace) see edit at bottom.

IMPORTANT: Be sure to thoroughly read his thread and any documentation before using them, and again if you run into any problems. Make a backup of your current reshade-shaders folder first in case you want to revert.

Again, these are not currently included in the standard ReShade shader download when you install ReShade as normal. There are still versions of MXAO and ADOF in the regular download, and you can keep using them if you prefer. These qUINT shaders are simply alternatives and additions, and are the ones currently under regular development by Marty. 

If you start using the qUINT shaders, you may have to edit your current MXAO and DoF settings to suit. See edit at bottom.

One exciting addition is the Lightroom shader. I have an early experimental version of this that I’ve been using for a while, and it aims to bring a whole host of editing options under one shader to cut out the need for multiples. I haven’t used this latest version yet, but the older version had an option to create a LUT directly within the GUI, which would include any Lightroom effects AND any others from other shaders you have active. That meant you could then deactivate all those shaders and simply use the LUT to achieve the same look. This is primarily to aid performance and make things very simple. 

NOTE: you shouldn’t use any bloom/fog/dof/mxao/sharpening-style effects when creating the LUT, only use colour and gamma/levels/curves-changing effects, then once the LUT is active you can add in those other effects as desired.

If you want to distribute a ReShade preset that uses any of these shaders, be sure to either direct users to download it direct from the link above, or include it in the download along with your preset file (the shaders are licensed under a CC BY-NC-ND 3.0 license).

It’s always worth checking the Presentation section of the ReShade forum for any exciting shaders people create. There are quite a few that never get included with the main download. I use perhaps three or four regularly and they form staples of my presets.

EDIT: I’ve taken a look at the file names, they are different to those in the standard download, so you’ll need to copy over your old settings to the new version (if applicable) and turn off or delete the old version as required. You can’t have both the old and new MXAO in at the same time. You CAN have the old ADoF (dof.fx) in at the same time as the new ADoF. You can have the old RBM in at the same time as SSR but why would you? RBM is a pos compared to the new one.