Moire Removal - Worghern Mod

[Oddball-47]

 For anyone playing CMFB who has been seeing the awful mess the moire patterns make, I've come across a mod made
by "Worghern" which removes it. I reccomend that you first fire up "Battle For Chaumant Part 1" before trying the mod out in CMFB to get an
idea of just how awful the moire effect was in that particular scenario.

  The download for the mod can be found here:
http://www.thefewgoodmen.com/cm-mod-warehouse/combat-mission-final-blitzkrieg/cmfb-scenery/worghern-blitzkrieg-environment-cmfb/

  Once downloaded and unzipped, it'll make a "Z" folder with everything contained in the mod within that. I renamed the resultant "Z" folder
to "ZZ_Warghorn CMFB" and just placed it into my main CMFB installation folder within  the DATA\Z subfolders and it works
very nicely.

Regards, Odd

  

[MG TOW]

Hats off to him. Those ground snow textures are just wow. 

[RockinHarry]

If we´re just talking about moire patterns on standard ploughed fields, then I found Kieme´s mod set does the purpose well already. 

http://www.thefewgoodmen.com/cm-mod-warehouse/combat-mission-battle-for-normandy/cmbn-scenery/kiemes-ploughed-fields-without-distortion/

Edit: Forgot that I had to add the tags to make it work in CMFB, so here´s my conversion on Kieme´s  files.

https://www.dropbox.com/s/qdglgfvl2yz16eo/Kiemes_Ground_Dirt_Ploughed.zip?dl=0

Edited June 16, 2019 by RockinHarry

[Aragorn2002]

2 Gig? Hefty file, but very interesting. Can you post some screenshots perhaps?

[Kevin2k]

I made it a habit to downscale the terrain tiles for all Combat Mission games 50%. This makes them less sharp, more blurry, which is AFAIK the most practical way to remove moire. It should not be a big mod. like 85 MB for Final Blitzkrieg.

Or is there some other method?

[RockinHarry]

38 minutes ago, Kevin2k said:

I made it a habit to downscale the terrain tiles for all Combat Mission games 50%. This makes them less sharp, more blurry, which is AFAIK the most practical way to remove moire. It should not be a big mod. like 85 MB for Final Blitzkrieg.

Or is there some other method?

I did the same for gravel, cobblestone and the like (512x512px) but for ploughed fields I think Kieme´s the most appropiate. Can´t tell about Worghern´s as i never bothered to dl or install for the huge size. 

[Kevin2k]

Yes. Ploughed fields are the worst moire offenders. My memory is coming back and I think I gave these particular tiles the extra treatment: Decrease the contrast between raised and lowered areas of the ploughed field. Make it a more uniform earth color tile.

Cobble stone roads were also more prone to unpleasant rendering.

A tile with a uniform color cannot have any moire or annoying pixelation. So it is about finding a comprimise between desired texture detail  and an always safe but flat uniform color.

OpenGL/Direct3D may have rendering options with similar goals, I don't know the particulars, but at least in Combat Mission games it was not to my liking at all. Hence my adjustments.

 

[RockinHarry]

This is Kieme´s original CMBN files tagged for use in CMFB. Eveything else remains the same on the ploughed fields (anything worse than patchy snow is full snow cover = white). Link to dropbox (again) https://www.dropbox.com/s/qdglgfvl2yz16eo/Kiemes_Ground_Dirt_Ploughed.zip?dl=0

[RockinHarry]

38 minutes ago, Kevin2k said:

Yes. Ploughed fields are the worst moire offenders. My memory is coming back and I think I gave these particular tiles the extra treatment: Decrease the contrast between raised and lowered areas of the ploughed field. Make it a more uniform earth color tile.

Cobble stone roads were also more prone to unpleasant rendering.

A tile with a uniform color cannot have any moire or annoying pixelation. So it is about finding a comprimise between desired texture detail  and an always safe but flat uniform color.

OpenGL/Direct3D may have rendering options with similar goals, I don't know the particulars, but at least in Combat Mission games it was not to my liking at all. Hence my adjustments.

 

Personally I found having too many high res textures on everything at last doesn´t improve anything at all and if unlucky the GFX cards memory can´t hold it (=CTD). Suffice to mention performance will go down to standstill. So a well balanced mix of low (512x512) and high (2048x2048) on certain tiles and objects serve optics and performance more than going just one way or the other. All IMO.

Another option would be to set parameters in the shader files (*.frag, *.vert) to your needs, as i.e contrast/lightness can be set individually to the game.

[Bulletpoint]

On 6/16/2019 at 9:35 AM, RockinHarry said:

If we´re just talking about moire patterns on standard ploughed fields, then I found Kieme´s mod set does the purpose well already. 

http://www.thefewgoodmen.com/cm-mod-warehouse/combat-mission-battle-for-normandy/cmbn-scenery/kiemes-ploughed-fields-without-distortion/

Edit: Forgot that I had to add the tags to make it work in CMFB, so here´s my conversion on Kieme´s  files.

https://www.dropbox.com/s/qdglgfvl2yz16eo/Kiemes_Ground_Dirt_Ploughed.zip?dl=0

Thanks for providing this, but I can't seem to make it work? I downloaded your files and put them in a subdirectory of the Z folder. But the plowed fields look the same in-game, and have the same distortion...

[Myles Keogh]

5 hours ago, Bulletpoint said:

Thanks for providing this, but I can't seem to make it work? I downloaded your files and put them in a subdirectory of the Z folder. But the plowed fields look the same in-game, and have the same distortion...

The "Z folder?"  On my PC, the only game that recognizes the "Z folder" for mods is CMBN.  All my other Combat Mission games including CMFB only recognizes mods placed in the User Data/Mods folder which is the documents directory.

From my understanding, there was a change in Windows that caused Battlefront to change the installation location and directories on the games released after CMBN which is why it's the only game that uses a "Z folder" for its mods.

[Bulletpoint]

1 hour ago, Myles Keogh said:

The "Z folder?"  On my PC, the only game that recognizes the "Z folder" for mods is CMBN.  All my other Combat Mission games including CMFB only recognizes mods placed in the User Data/Mods folder which is the documents directory.

From my understanding, there was a change in Windows that caused Battlefront to change the installation location and directories on the games released after CMBN which is why it's the only game that uses a "Z folder" for its mods.

For a moment I thought this was the solution, but it still doesn't work, even after I moved the mods to the final blitzkrieg\userdata\mods folder.

The only mod that "takes" is the panther turret. That shows up with the changed texture in game. All the other mods just get ignored for some reason... I must be doing something wrong, but can't figure out what it is...

 

[Oddball-47]

In my installation of Final Blitzkrieg, I told it to install to the "E" drive, which it did. However, it then also put
some folders in my "Documents" area under Battlefront.
  The "data" folder you want to use is not the "userdata" folder. I think you want the one you can locate thusly:
This PC>Disk E (or whatever you installed CMFB to)>CM Final Blitzkrieg>Data>Z (Make this folder and put the mods in it)

Regards, Odd

[A Canadian Cat]

Both locations work. That allows you to put version specific mods in a z folder in the game install's data folder and shared mods in the my documents userdata folder. This comes in handy if you ever need to have multiple versions of a game installed.

[Kevin2k]

By request I uploaded a tutorial of a Moire reduction method to my website. It is still the same thing as I described two years ago, in this topic. It has a preview image of the in-game view before and after the modification, photoshop files and a photoshop action.

It can be found here:

http://www.gb-homepage.nl/index.htm

Select the Combat Mission section in the left navigation pane there.

Hope it is clear enough, and that it may give people a compromise that is more pleasant to look at.

[rocketman]

16 hours ago, Kevin2k said:

By request I uploaded a tutorial of a Moire reduction method to my website. It is still the same thing as I described two years ago, in this topic. It has a preview image of the in-game view before and after the modification, photoshop files and a photoshop action.

It can be found here:

http://www.gb-homepage.nl/index.htm

Select the Combat Mission section in the left navigation pane there.

Hope it is clear enough, and that it may give people a compromise that is more pleasant to look at.

Thanks, will definitely have a look at it as the moiré patterns make my head/eyes hurt real bad

By the way - really nice fantasy drawings on the site as well! Do you do any professional work?

[Kevin2k]

On 5/24/2021 at 3:58 PM, rocketman said:

Thanks, will definitely have a look at it as the moiré patterns make my head/eyes hurt real bad

By the way - really nice fantasy drawings on the site as well! Do you do any professional work?

Hope it works out.

Thanks for the compliment. These drawings are from years ago. 2001..2004 IIRC. I was in a graphics school then too, graduated and... ended up doing something else entirely.

[rocketman]

I still see moiré with this mod only a little less pronounced. Moire occurs with a repeating pattern and not with a single terrain tile, so my conclusion is that it is all about the pattern on the single tile and if it will induce moiré when repeated. I have downloaded some terrain textures that look promising in that they can be a fair representation of a plowed field, but not creating moiré. First test is looking promising. Will do some work with this when I find time and give players a few options to try. Right now I have three different textures that I hope can work out well.

My experience is that moiré occurs most in sunny conditions, but I might be wrong. One thing is for sure and that is that the pattern occurs much more at different camera angles toward the ground, direction orientation and general light conditions.

[Bulletpoint]

On 6/16/2021 at 12:03 AM, rocketman said:

My experience is that moiré occurs most in sunny conditions, but I might be wrong.

The higher the contrast, the worse. The worst case seems to be light snow plowed fields. I'm wondering why I am not seeing this moire effect in other games.

Did the textures you downloaded solve the problem?

[rocketman]

I haven't had time to work on it but the first texture worked. Even if they work I will have to improve them so that they fit the overall color scheme of the games. So one might be suited to FI and another to RT/BS and so on. I agree on the contast thing - same with shadows, much more jagged in those conditions.

[rocketman]

By chance I saw that Kieme made a terrain mod for Black Sea which uses the same idea that I have for making plowed fields as free from moiré as possible. My current test texture is pretty good and like Kieme's it reduces moiré significantly but not entirely. So I suggest downloading it for now and I will make mine later on. I hope it is available at CMMODS. I will probably concentrate on making on that suits FI as Kieme's work for the other titles. How to deal with season changes I haven't thought about yet. 

[Redwolf]

Can somebody who knows more about 3D technology explain why anisotropic filtering doesn't get rid of the moire effect in CMx2? I thought that was the whole point of anisotropic filtering.

[Lucky_Strike]

2 hours ago, Redwolf said:

Can somebody who knows more about 3D technology explain why anisotropic filtering doesn't get rid of the moire effect in CMx2? I thought that was the whole point of anisotropic filtering.

I am no expert on 3D, but I do know a little about moiré in the traditional sense and consequentially why anisotropic filters don't do anything to alleviate it. A moiré pattern is usually caused when two screen patterns interfere with each other, in print this could happen when images that have already been printed, and so made into a pattern of dots, are then printed again so that the dot pattern that makes up the original printed image clashes with the dot pattern of the newly printed image, producing interference. The same effect used to be quite common on older CRT TVs when, for instance, someone wore a striped tie which would clash with the lines that made up the TV screen image. What we see in CM is similar to this, the lines of the ploughed field are clashing, or interfering, with the lines that make up the screen image.

Anisotropic filtering is doing a couple of things, the primary objective is to tackle aliasing of surface textures, the jaggies along edges, noticeably in CM the shadows have quite jaggy edges. It also helps to sharpen some details. Ultimately it probably makes moirés worse because of the sharpening. To get rid of the moiré would require the reverse, that is some filter that blurs or softens, or even randomises, the offending linear textures, which we sadly don't have.

There are some filters in ReShade that can effect softening and blurring, but I've not had a look to see if we could remove the moiré with them as I only tend to use those filters for screen shots at ground level where moiré is not an issue.

[Bulletpoint]

On 7/23/2021 at 12:50 AM, Lucky_Strike said:

I am no expert on 3D, but I do know a little about moiré in the traditional sense and consequentially why anisotropic filters don't do anything to alleviate it.

Strangely, the wikipedia article on moire says it "can be overcome in texture mapping through the use of mipmapping and anisotropic filtering".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moiré_pattern

[Lucky_Strike]

7 hours ago, Bulletpoint said:

Strangely, the wikipedia article on moire says it "can be overcome in texture mapping through the use of mipmapping and anisotropic filtering".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moiré_pattern

Not convinced by that article that anisotropic filtering will do anything for moiré; though am no expert at pixel level manipulation, happy to admit I could be completely wrong. I can see how mipmapping could be useful, but, so far as I know, the game engine doesn't use those. It has the LOD textures, but I don't think that's what we need to solve the issue.

Randomising the texture a bit might help, less regular spacing of the ploughed lines, but I fear it won't be a solution because of the regularity with which the pattern is repeated.