Creative Update

Hey, all! So, here's what's been going on in my world creatively!

I've been working on a rewrite of SEUS PTGI, and have been experimenting with some new approaches to ray tracing. SEUS PTGI has been in need of a rewrite for a few years, and I'm redesigning it from the ground up. Some of the new ray tracing capabilities are really exciting, but I'm not sure yet how it will perform. It's too early to tell where these experiments will lead for sure, but I'll keep you updated! 

I've also been working on ReShade shaders! Being a huge Dark Souls fan, I was working particularly with Dark Souls III, and now Elden Ring, but of course, my shaders will work with any game that has proper depth buffer access. Here's an overview of what I've been doing there:

-Un-tonemap the image to attempt to put it back into linear HDR space.

-Analyze the current and previous color frames and generate motion vectors. This is a particularly difficult task in real-time, and the motion vectors are barely good enough for subtle motion blur, but they are quite decent for temporal accumulation

-Apply screen-space lighting/shadowing. I've been working on a shader here that attempts to fix a lighting issue that the Souls games have had in particular, lots of directional ambient lighting with no shadows. These games have just relied on SSAO to try to apply ambient shadowing, but this doesn't do a great job. My screen-space lighting works on one main assumption: that the final scene color can, with some heuristics, represent the raw diffuse lighting in the game. So, a red, blue, or black surface is assumed to be that color because of the lighting, not because of the material. This assumption allows me to apply shadowing in a way that I haven't really seen in a screen-space effect before. If this were applied to a lighting-only buffer, I think this could be quite stunning! Here in ReShade, we only have access to the final image that includes material colors. Because of this, the effect causes unintended material color bleeding, but most of the time I think the result is quite nice. It at least removes pretty much all of the totally shadowless/contactless look of Dark Souls III and Elden Ring. I also apply ambient occlusion and indirect lighting. I utilize the motion vectors generated above to do temporal denoising.

-Apply a TAA pass. The noise generated from the pass before needs to be cleaned up further. We've put in all the work to generate motion vectors, we might as well gain additional image stability for little extra cost. The goal is a cinematic look with as little shimmering aliasing as possible. The effect described above would be quite badly aliased and shimmer without this pass.

-Apply custom tonemapping. Right now I'm using a slightly modified ACES tonemapping operator. There is an opportunity to apply bloom/lens effects before this pass, but I haven't experimented with this yet.

The motion vector generation and screen-space shadowing effects are, to be frank, very expensive. Generating motion vectors with nothing but the final rendered image is very difficult, and the screen-space lighting is relying on tracing quite a few samples at the moment. More sophisticated denoising will help in the future bring down the sample counts for better performance. 

Still, I still think these shaders would be worth sharing, even in their highly experimental and unoptimized state. I've been forced to play Elden Ring locked to 30 fps to avoid stuttering anyway, that headroom has allowed me to enjoy playing the game with them at 4k. You're gonna need a really beefy GPU and may need to limit your framerate to 30 fps depending on what resolution you play at. 

Here are some comparison screenshots, first showing without the shaders, then with. Note: I had SSAO disabled in-game because it interferes with my shader.

I've also worked on a few other ReShade shaders: a VHS filter, a painterly shader, and a bloom/lens flare shader. I need to update these to the latest version of ReShade, but I'd also like to eventually share those as well!

Finally, I've started developing my own game! I've been working with my best friend, we've both been dreaming of making our own game since we met in middle school. We've been balancing our time between working on our game and working on SEUS.

We are taking our time with experimenting, prototyping, and developing our game concept, so we don't have a whole lot to show yet. As soon as we have something that we feel is worth sharing, we will do so!