#smaa

[suprgalwrites]

Alt cover for SMAA

[pictureamoebae]

Hi! So, I'm curious about something. I'm thinking about giving ReShade another try (the first one was... rather unsuccessful), so here are my two doubts. One of my biggest problems is that, without edge smoothing, things where quite pixelated at the edges. I tried messing with the FXAA and the SMAA setting, but still the rough edges were noticeable. I probably was doing something wrong or something, any recommendation? And the other I think will go on another ask, haha. Anyway, thank you!

Hi anon. 

SMAA generally gives a better result in most games than FXAA, and is the one I use.

Change the threshold setting to 0.02. You’ll need to double-click or right-click in the box and type it in because the slider doesn’t go that low (you can do that with more or less all boxes that contain a numerical value). With that threshold and all the other settings as high as they can go (except for corner rounding, which should be left either on 0 or very low, because it messes too much with text in menus otherwise) you should catch quite a lot of those jaggies.

There will still be some that escape. Most noticeable will be on windows and some other things with transparency. That’s because the shader treats it as a solid object and doesn’t know to apply anti-aliasing to inner edges around panes of glass. You can try playing around with the transparency anti-aliasing settings of your graphics card driver (through nvidia control panel if that’s what you use) but I haven’t noticed a massive difference doing so myself.

You’ll also want to pay attention to where in the load order SMAA comes. It should as a rule be below effects like MXAO and DoF. I sandwich it between them and the rest of the colour effects. (MXAO should generally come first in the load order, certainly before any other depth effects like fog, depth haze, and DoF). You can reorder effects by dragging and dropping them in the list in the ReShade menu.

I’ll answer your other question in a separate reply!

[collabwithmyself]

I can't get this song out of my head and the entire thing is just so fitting for SMAA

(Song: A Death by An Unkindness)

[collabwithmyself]

I've got to hand it to you

You've played by all the same rules

It takes the truth to fool me

And now you've made me angry.

[pictureamoebae]

Hey there! I just had a quick reshade question. Sorry for being so abrupt, but I was pointed in your direction. I know in order to get DOF to work in reshade when it comes to TS$, you need to turn edge smoothing off. But doing that makes all the presets that don’t use DOF look a lot worse, despite having everything set to ultra graphics. My question: is there some way to deal with that?? Would switching to high quality textures fix the issue? Thank you so much for your time!

Edge smoothing is anti-aliasing, so if you turn it off you need to use another type one way or another to compensate. ReShade comes with two types of anti-aliasing: SMAA and FXAA. I find SMAA to be a lot better, so that’s what I use. My settings are as follows:

threshold = 0.02

search steps = 112

search steps diagonal = 20

corner rounding = 0

There will still be some edges that are a bit jaggy from time to time, but they shouldn’t be particularly noticeable. 

If you want to go the extra mile to get the most anti-aliasing you can, you can try downsampling or hotsampling.

Downsampling means running the game at a larger resolution than your native monitor resolution and shrinking it back down so it fits on your monitor. If you have an nvidia card you can do this quickly and easily in the nvidia control panel by setting up DSR resolutions, and then choosing one of them in the game. Be aware though you do require a good PC to be able to play downsampled because it’s rendering many times more pixels than it ordinarily would and that takes resources. All those extra pixels do, however, mean superior anti-aliasing.

Hotsampling is similar to downsampling, but just for screenshots rather than for gameplay. This is what I do for my screenshots. I use a program called SRWE that lets me change the size and shape of the game window whenever I want. It means I can play the game at its regular size, and when I have set up a screenshot I can change the window size to much larger, take the shot, then change it back to normal again. While you still need to have a half-decent PC to do this, it’s much more forgiving than playing the game downsampled, because you’re only increasing the resolution for short periods when it doesn’t matter if everything grinds to a halt. I wrote a tutorial on using SRWE here (it uses Mass Effect: Andromeda as its example, but the same steps all apply to TS4).

Using HQ textures will have no effect on anti-aliasing, but of course will likely improve the image quality in other ways so that’s entirely up to you whether you use them or not. I don’t, and I’m quite happy with the quality of my game, but I use maxis match content, where HQ textures aren’t as noticeable anyway. Either way, as I say, it doesn’t impact aliasing at all.

[pictureamoebae]

Eliminating jagged edges

I just got a message about how to get rid of jagged edges with ReShade. I’m reproducing my reply here because I think it’ll be useful to some just starting out.

The jagged edges you can see are an example of what is called ‘aliasing’. You might have heard the term ‘anti-aliasing’ in video games, which means an algorithm is applied to reduce the appearance of those jagged edges and smooth them. Most games come with their own version of anti-aliasing. In TS4 it’s called Edge Smoothing and it’s in the main graphics menu. If you want to use any depth-based effects in ReShade (like MXAO or DOF) you have to turn Edge Smoothing off, or they won’t work. Of course, this will cause more jagged edges to appear again, which we don’t want.

Luckily, ReShade comes with its own versions of anti-aliasing: FXAA and SMAA. You can use either of them, but I prefer SMAA—it’s less destructive to the image (FXAA and SMAA are post-processing methods of anti-aliasing, which means they are applied to the image as a whole *after* the game has rendered the objects, and they can slightly blur the image, SMAA however blurs a lot less and in most cases is generally able to achieve a better result).

So, in the ReShade GUI go ahead and find the SMAA line and turn it on. You can leave it at that if you want, or you can play with the values a little. I always change the ‘threshold’, because the lower the threshold the more aggressive (or strong, or effective) the anti-aliasing. I change it all the way down to 0.02, but you might have good results with 0.05 or even higher depending on what your PC can handle.

Another thing you want to do is reorder the shaders so they work together in the best way. SMAA should come after/below any depth-based effects, and before/above most other things. If you are using a sharpening shader, make sure it comes right after SMAA. You can reorder shaders by dragging them up and down the list in the GUI.

(A note on reordering: MXAO should always be at the very top of the list. I also find DOF should come after all other depth effects like adaptive fog, but before any non-depth effects. SMAA should always come after DOF. You can play around with the order of all the other effects to see what looks best to your eyes.)

SMAA will never catch all of the jagged edges, but it’ll do a good job smoothing most of them. You may find yourself getting more exaggerated jagged edges sometimes when using DOF, as the transition between blurred and not blurred complicates things, but that can be mostly solved by paying attention to your focus distances in the DOF shader, and potentially altering your composition to avoid awkward transitions.

Another thing that greatly reduces aliasing is ‘downsampling’ or ‘hotsampling’. You need a reasonably powerful PC to do either of these. Both of them essentially mean rendering the game window at a larger size than your native resolution, and then shrinking it back down to fit afterwards. What this does is give the image many more pixels to fill in all the gaps, which is the most successful method of aliasing (you may have heard of ‘supersampling’—this uses the same theory). But of course, rendering all those many more thousands of pixels requires more power from your PC’s hardware. The ‘cheapest’ way to do it is hotsampling. I’ve written about this elsewhere (tutorial refers to Mass Effect: Andromeda, but the process is the same for TS4), but it requires using a program called SRWE, which lets you change the size and shape of the game window on the fly while you play. This means you can play in your native resolution, and temporarily increase the window size to take a screenshot, then change the window back to normal afterwards. The resulting screenshot will be a lot bigger than normal, and when viewed at your normal resolution (it will be shrunk to fit in most cases, or you can manually resize it in photoshop or similar) it will make the edges a lot more smooth, almost entirely eliminating the aliasing.

I hope this is helpful. If you have any more questions please get in touch.

[jsvjbmh]

Supernatural Movie Actor App

I… I finished the novel ^^ I wasn’t wrong what I said previously. Maybe a bit in the details.. The thing about Shen Yi is a little bit complicate to explain for me (and would also contain a bunch of spoilers)

I’ve said it before, but I was not expecting to like the novel as much as I did. It stills feels a little bit weird to read about someone who is in a relationship with their own 2nd personality, but I’ll just ignore that tiny detail I guess XD. But I liked the ending, just a little bit sad we didn’t god to read about how the other characters are doing. There are a couple extras, but not everyone is mentioned.. Like I talked about a new characters with also a 2nd personality.. I don’t know how they are doing? Also, at a certain point, you just stop seeing the 2nd personality of that person? Not sure if I missed something, I mean, probably, but still..

Anyways, time to find something new ^^

[jsvjbmh]

Supernatural Movie Actor App

So, I finished the Zombie Lovers arc, i was kinda stupid and wrong. For the thing that the MC wanted to do, he didn’t need the body of the late husband :’)… However, he did make the living zombie.

Also, I’m kinda more invested at the moment about the past of MC. There is this Shen Yi(?) and I’m pretty sure he’s related to MC’s past. I assume he was a Pet (not quiet sure what that means. It’s not really explained? Only that they couldn’t get sick?). I just started the next arc, which is a Talent Show. A new character got introduced who also has a secondary personality. While MC’s main & second personality are both male, with this new character the main personality is male and the second is a woman (I mean, that’s what I’m getting from it. I might be totally wrong as usual).