#or at least the mxao and dof settings have

[nonsensical-pixels]

im finally doing it... im switching to gshade

ps for anyone still commenting on this i did not end up switching to gshade 💔

[landgraabbed]

hey cat, quick q that i hope you don't mind answering. i can't quite get depth of field to work right for TS2 in reshade. how do you have yours configured/what shader do you use, or at least how you get it to actually... work? if that makes sense!

hi nonners! before all else please know that i am no expert. i just clown around with the settings until i get close to where i want to be. so this may be a very roundabout way to get results, just the way i found to work for me.

from my experimentation depth of field dependent shaders are quite finicky with ts2, in my preset that includes dof and mxao shaders, and it does require a fair bit of tweaking with the d9 tab and selecting different options according to reshade's mood.

my biggest observation is it acts differently in free camera mode vs out of free cam mode, in the sense that depth shaders look to me as if they are very toned down in tab/free camera. so i tend to exaggerate my settings! in my preset i use adof/quint_dof. these are the parameters (u can edit them directly on your preset's .ini file or through the reshade ui in game):

i also have the following preprocessor definitions:

RESHADE_DEPTH_LINEARIZATION_FAR_PLANE=1000.0

RESHADE_DEPTH_INPUT_IS_UPSIDE_DOWN=0

RESHADE_DEPTH_INPUT_IS_REVERSED=0

RESHADE_DEPTH_INPUT_IS_LOGARITHMIC=0

MXAO_SMOOTHNORMALS=1

MXAO_ENABLE_IL=1

MXAO_TWO_LAYER=0

MXAO_MIPLEVEL_IL=1

i hope it helps! lmk if you have more questions or need clarification

[exhabigou]

               after days of switching between several presets and not really being satisfied with a lot of them, i finally caved in and made my own! and also realized that i don’t really need a fancy one. just one that has what i need. 

disclaimer: i am not an expert on gshade and this is the first preset i have ever made. it’s not perfect, but it works for me so ... 

              this preset only has seven shaders, five if you turn off mxao and dof, and all it does is make your game very bright without too big of an impact on performance ( well, at least for me. ). feel free to adjust it if you need to, or use it as a basis for your own preset. also some things to note:

f8 - toggles mxao and dof

turn off edge smoothing on your game settings

i am using sunblind by @softerhaze​​ 

made with gshade 3.5.0. you can follow this tutorial if you want to get it. 

this preset will make your game very bright. just setting expectation lmao. 

              if you get any issues, you can shoot me a message. again, i am not an expert but i will do my best to help you out. also not sure if this will work with ts3. you can try it, if you want! 

download. 

more screenshots under the cut. 

[softpine]

how in depth do you edit your story posts? would you say reshade does a lot of it or do you go in and add details a lot? how long does it take? i’m doing a story myself and i want to keep telling it but the long editing process sets me back and can be de motivating sometimes and i’m just wondering if you have any tips on cutting it down or speeding the process up?

oh i totally know what you mean – editing is by far my LEAST favorite part of the process, so i do anything i can do to speed it up. i would say reshade does about 60% of the work, and then i run my own personal action in photoshop which does another 20% of the work (basically just resize, smart sharpen, denoise, and a very basic color grade to help boost skintones). the rest is just small details that vary from picture to picture. landscape pictures can take me less than 2 minutes to edit, whereas shots with multiple sims can take me upwards of 30 minutes because i'm a freak about using the liquify tool to smooth out sharp edges, redrawing stuff to get rid of clipping, fixing skin banding by hand, etc. the rest is just using various blurs (usually iris blur), and applying a final color grade / hue adjustments. LITERALLY the devil is in the details 😭

so now that i've complained for ages, here are my tips on speeding things up fjksjd

1. put all your reshade effects on a toggle, and take multiple screenshots with the effects on/off. ESPECIALLY if you have a wide variety of skintones. for example, finn is pale as fuck and bloom makes him look like.... well, a ghost:

so i take one pic WITH bloom:

one without:

and then i layer them in photoshop and use a soft eraser at a lower opacity (depends on the pic) to erase some of the bloom on his face. this means i never have to mess with my bloom settings in-game for every single picture i take. i do the same thing for dof or mxao if they’re giving me trouble. one pic on, one pic off, layer them, and erase.

2. create your own action and/or psd! there are tons of tutorials out there. whichever effects you find yourself using on a regular basis, combine them all in one to save you from doing boring shit over and over :’) i don’t find it super helpful to use other people’s actions, because everyone has a different style, but if you’re new to photoshop, it might be nice to download some actions just to try new things out!

3. this tip kinda sucks because i know most people on simblr don’t have a l*gal copy of photoshop (no shade, i p*rated for literally 10 years lmao and i only got the real copy bc it was free through my mom’s work) but the newest version of photoshop has sooo many cool effects. sky replacement (my beloved), neural filters (depth blur is SO good now, the edges are crisp as hell. you could probably get rid of dof in reshade altogether now), and camera raw filter (basically a one-stop-shop for every adjustment you may need, and has the ability to save presets in the same way you would use a psd). all of these save me so much time. i would be happy to do a more in-depth tutorial on this stuff if you’re interested, but like i said, i know most people don’t have access to these :(

EDIT: check the replies for a link that may help you out :)

4. simply edit less. sometimes i have to remind myself that no one will be zooming up into my sim’s hand to see if their ring has some clipping issues. you are your own worst enemy and of course you’ll notice every single flaw, but most other people won’t. if the only way you can realistically and feasibly tell your story is to edit less (or not edit at all) then so be it!! that’s okay!! do whatever you can do to lessen your stress 💖

[squea]

Hi, amber! This isn't really a WCIF, but I'm wondering how you learned to make a reshade. Was it just trial and error/messing around, or was there a tutorial/video that you saw, or...? I'm interested in making a reshade for my own personal use, but all the numbers and settings are a bit intimidating. Thanks in advance!

literally just messing about!!! find a reshade preset you like something from such as the mxao, and apply that to a different reshade, then some people post their dof settings and bloom settings. its literally all just trial and error and just clicking checkboxes when u think something looks nice. i would say have an idea in your head of the style you want, for example, i wanted a kind of storytelling dof and yet suited for gameplay shots so little extreme bloom and colour grading. its all about building up and just checking boxes! it took ages bc i was just having fun, but start with the things you absolutely need ie, i started with adding a DOF, SMAA (i cant remember the exact name for that)/FXAA, and mxao. once i had those 3 nailed how i wanted them to look, i worked on other things like bloom and contrast filters, then i usually wait to do the more filtery colour grading at the end of the process such as the multilut/dpx/curves/colourfullness shaders! i hope this helped!

oh and dont be afraid to go crazy with the numbers just to see what they do, you can always right click the field and reset to default if you forget where you started (at least with version 4.x you can)

lmk if i can help at all! and also you can use aphros and tweak it all you like if youd rather work with a base :D

[pictureamoebae]

Right, a call for help:

Can my TS4 peeps give me as detailed a run-down as possible about what’s new with the game? Over, like, the last 12 months?

Don’t get excited. I opened the game for the first time in what I think is a year (I don’t have a 2020 screenshot folder for TS4, so it must have been a year), updated it, bought everything I didn’t have (the last things I bought were mosquito and the witches), and went in to test a couple of things for people who have been having problems recently.

Good news is ReShade (3.4.1 -- I *might* try and update to a newer version, idk) and SRWE seem to be working as they always did, including MXAO and DoF, which I know some people have been having problems with recently - so that suggests to me it’s not a problem with the game or ReShade but rather something maybe with individual settings.

Next is to check the red shelf works fine, because I’ve had a few questions about that recently too.

I really, really don’t know what the state of the game is atm. The only cc I have in is the red shelf, for testing. I’m sure every single one of my 2000 pieces of cc and mods are all otherwise broken now. Good news, for me at least, is I’m really impressed with the new clothes over the past year, and the makeup (some of it, anyway). I haven’t checked out the new worlds, new gameplay, or build-buy stuff yet.

So, if you can tell me what’s new, that would be really great. I have no idea how to find out all in one place. So, stuff like what game mechanics have changed, did I see something to do with windows? That sort of thing. You know, fundamental stuff. New cheats? Old stuff broken? New must-have mods? What are the new worlds and what are they like? A run-down of new gameplay from the various packs? Like I said, I’ve not played it at all since mosquito and witches, and I didn’t really play for more than a day or two with them installed either. The last pack I really explored was Strangerville.

Thank you <3

[pictureamoebae]

TS4 and MXAO: Some Issues?

I was recently contacted by someone who had been experiencing issues in TS4 since the stairs update, where MXAO was disappearing when they moved their camera up, and reappearing when they moved their camera down.

I’ve updated my game and started a new save with no mods and checked myself (because I haven’t played since before the stairs update). I can confirm I’m seeing the same behaviour.

If any of you have used MXAO with the Indirect Lighting (IL) option in the past you’ll be familiar with how the IL effect can change rapidly when moving the camera. This is because ReShade and MXAO make hundreds of calculations constantly, working out where solid objects are, where in the distance they sit, how far they are away from other objects, and the angle from which we are viewing them. With this information MXAO renders Ambient Occlusion (AO) and IL to create semi-realistic shadows and light reflections based on how objects interact with each other to block light or reflect it. With IL, it works to bounce light off one object onto another, and as we move the camera, even just changing the angle, how light will bounce and reflect changes -- and so we sometimes see rapid changes in the strength and colour of the reflected IL.

It seems that the same is happening with the AO part of MXAO now too. It may well have always done this (it’s been a while since I’ve played so I don’t remember), but perhaps a recent update has done something to the game’s depth buffer (which is what ReShade hooks into in order to let us use depth effects like MXAO) making those calculations more sensitive. I can’t give a solid reason why it’s happening, and I don’t know if it’s affecting everyone and every version of ReShade (I use 3.4.1), but I can understand why it would be annoying.

I had some relief from it by editing my graphicsruls.sgr file to turn off ssao and dof, but it was still happening. One thing I noticed was that it seemed to affect shadows in the distance more than in the foreground, and between objects that have a wide distance between them. Now, in reality if I hold a cup in front of me I would not expect it to cast a shadow on a hill in the distance, but the limitations of ReShade mean that sometimes that can happen with MXAO if the settings aren’t tweaked to avoid it (look for the tool tips that talk about viewing angle and self-shadowing). What this new behaviour seems to be doing when it weakens MXAO when moving the camera up is actually applying a more realistic MXAO, so that cup in front of my face isn’t shadowing the hill in the distance any more. With the camera moved up, I still saw nearby foliage shadows but distance shadows disappeared or became weaker. 

I know of no solution at the moment that will give a consistent MXAO at all camera angles. Some things I suggest, however:

edit graphicsrules.sgr to turn off ssao and dof

play around with the MXAO settings that relate to viewing angle and self-shadowing

get used to editing your MXAO settings regularly as you set up shots -- I’ve always done this, and it’s a necessity if you use exaggerated AO and IL settings anyway, but it may be a necessity with more subtle settings now too

I’m sorry if this is affecting some people’s enjoyment when using ReShade. If I find another solution, or at least a way to mitigate the worst of it, I’ll let you know. In the meantime, I hope you have a bit better understanding of how MXAO works, and why it may be doing this, so you can try to work with the shader yourself and get the best out of it in difficult circumstances.

If you’re not experiencing this behaviour, it would be useful to know the version of ReShade you’re using, and also your MXAO settings. Perhaps we will be able to narrow down what’s going on in that way.

[pictureamoebae]

I finally admitted that my computer is too old for heavy reshades (rip ;( ) and I wondered what's your least heavy ReShade?

Any of my presets can be made less heavy by a) not using some of the heavier optional effects like fog, dof, mxao, ambient light; and/or b) changing some of the quality settings in mxao and dof -- I set them to high quality but you can change them to lower quality without too much of a difference in how it looks.

But as for a truly lightweight preset I don’t currently have one. But it’s certainly something I could look into -- something very simple that doesn’t dramatically change the visuals but rather enhances them. I’ll think about it!

[pictureamoebae]

whoah, your reshade preset is amazing! would you ever consider releasing it? (or linking if it's someone else's)?? :o thank you so much!! ps your blog rocks

Aw, you’re adorable, anon, thank you!!

The only reason I haven’t released it so far is because I tweak a lot of things on the fly and have a bunch of toggles for different settings to turn them on and off when I need them. Plus it’s a bit awkward for regular gameplay. Basically, it takes a bit of work to use it, and I’m not sure how up for that anyone is.

To illustrate, I have the very base preset, which leaves everything kind of flat and blue. 

Then I have bloom and the filmicpass shader that I keep on all the time on top of that (except when in cas), which brightens things and warms them up slightly – they both have their own key bind. 

Then there’s the second (I have two of them) tonemapping shader, and that’s the one I open up in the GUI regularly to adjust to brighten or darken a scene as needed. It’s generally left on all the time, though (although sometimes turned off in cas).

Then there is adaptive fog, which I leave on almost all the time (although I turn it off during interior gameplay because you can’t see it from indoors anyway and I’m all for saving a bit of performance), which creates the distance fog you can see in my exterior shots. That has its own key bind to toggle it on and off.

Then there is MXAO (ambient occlusion) for object shadowing (and indirect lighting - to reflect colour and light back on objects from the objects that are near to them), which is set quite broad to shadow the environment/objects rather than sims. That’s on all the time but also has its own toggle for when I’m building or in cas.

Then there’s RBM – reflective bump mapping. This adds reflections to shallow surfaces. It’s on by default but I turn it off regularly because a) it’s a performance hog; and b) it screws with how sims look sometimes in a few circumstances.

Then we have ambient light, which is off by default but I turn on for some exterior shots and almost all of my shots in Oasis Springs. It has its own key bind toggle.

Then there’s the colour filter shader. It too has its own key bind, is off by default, but I use it all the time in Oasis Springs (not so much elsewhere though).

Then there’s depth haze, which adds a little more bright fog in the distance and blurs it ever so slightly. I use this on occasion for wide landscape shots. I used it for all my Oasis Springs night shots. It has its own toggle.

Then there’s a final bloom (3rd type of bloom in use, btw) shader that I use very, very rarely, which has its own key bind (of course!). 

Then… last but not least there are the two dof (blur) shaders I have set up, each for different occasions. They both have toggle keys but also require manual fiddling-with in the GUI to get distances and blur levels right on a per-shot basis. They are off by default.

So you see, anon, it’s not that I don’t want to share, but I’m not certain how useful anyone will find it because of the sheer amount of work involved in using it. Plus I expect if you don’t have a decently powerful computer you’d struggle to run it anyway because of the amount of effects involved.

If you’re still interested after all of that, let me know and I’ll have a bit more of a think about it. 

Edit: I forgot to add, it’s also just a very bad preset. It crushes colour tones and causes horrific banding and sometimes I don’t take a shot at all because of it. I use grain from the Deband shader to try to counteract some of it, but it’s not always successful.