RT Unofficial Screenshot Thread

[Lucky_Strike]

15 hours ago, Artkin said:

Some people post such incredible content that its hard to believe we're playing the same game. This is outstanding. What a delicious flavor to add to the game. 

Thanks Artkin. Hopefully more (mods) to come soon.

[Lucky_Strike]

9 hours ago, RockinHarry said:

Looks gorgeous! And quite a creative composition as well. Having depth of field adds so much more to our CM sceneries. So you really got me interested (Reshade) and I just downloaded the setup tool. Is it latest Version 5.4.2 to be used with CM or anything else? https://reshade.me/

I will find out later for you which version of ReShade I'm using ATM, I know for certain it's not the latest, I tend to stick with a very stable, non-updated versions of most stuff on my PC since I don't trust updates to not ruin my setup ( yes, that's you I'm pointing my finger at nVidia). It's only for playing CM so it's fine tuned for that and nothing else. All my development work and real life stuff is on my Mac.

DoF is such a sweet effect but a bit difficult to get right, I'll see if I can isolate the settings I use to send you an ini file for it. CM has a very simplistic depth framework which means setting up for it has very little room for manoeuvre. There are some useful tools in ReShade to help analyse draw distances which are helpful to set up DoF. The actual in-play overhead for these effects is not too bad as well, less than stuff like antialiasing.

Also worth looking at is using one of the LUT shaders, these employ a simple lookup file to affect the overall colour of the game, think filters and post processing / colour grading in films. I used different ones for each of the colour ways in the images above. There are tons of LUTs available on the web for free and they are tiny files that take seconds to try on the fly. Chuck in stuff like bloom, mist and film grain and the possibilities expand exponentially.

There's one effect I really like which recreates the phenomenon one has of looking out from shadow into brightly lit areas on a sunny day, one's eyes take a little time to adjust and the brightness reduces a little as our pupils contract. I think it's called adaptive lighting or adaptive bloom, something like that. 

[Lucky_Strike]

7 hours ago, NPye said:

I can't stop looking at this set, I tried to get reshade for Mac but guess what....only for PCs. Is there a solution available??? Awesome work everyone massive TY

Yes sadly PC only, my only guess at trying it on a Mac would be under emulation which would really depend on how powerful your Mac is. I've never tried but I have run CM under emulation in both CrossOver and Fusion, useful for the odd time I just want to try something quickly on a PC but don't want to fire up the real one. Emulation has come on massively in the last decade because of improvement in hardware and how well the software can access the hardware.

Also don't forget you have BootCamp on the Mac, not exactly playing on a Mac but you can try ReShade running fully native under Windows.

[Lucky_Strike]

7 hours ago, NPye said:

I need it for Mac , it's a game changer I love the DOF filter.

Be warned it's very addictive...

[Lucky_Strike]

7 hours ago, NPye said:

I can't stop looking at this set, I tried to get reshade for Mac but guess what....only for PCs. Is there a solution available??? Awesome work everyone massive TY

7 hours ago, NPye said:

I need it for Mac , it's a game changer I love the DOF filter.

Of course another possibility is using one of the cloud PC services like Shadow or Loudplay or Parsec or GeForce Now

I seriously considered these when looking at upgrades to my PC, but my setup is alright for now. However if I have to upgrade in the future I may well go down the cloud computing route - may look a bit pricey but actually it works out quite reasonably if you look at it medium to long term, especially with the cost of decent CPU/GPUs these days. 

[RockinHarry]

34 minutes ago, Lucky_Strike said:

I will find out later for you which version of ReShade I'm using ATM, I know for certain it's not the latest, I tend to stick with a very stable, non-updated versions of most stuff on my PC since I don't trust updates to not ruin my setup ( yes, that's you I'm pointing my finger at nVidia). It's only for playing CM so it's fine tuned for that and nothing else. All my development work and real life stuff is on my Mac.

DoF is such a sweet effect but a bit difficult to get right, I'll see if I can isolate the settings I use to send you an ini file for it. CM has a very simplistic depth framework which means setting up for it has very little room for manoeuvre. There are some useful tools in ReShade to help analyse draw distances which are helpful to set up DoF. The actual in-play overhead for these effects is not too bad as well, less than stuff like antialiasing.

Also worth looking at is using one of the LUT shaders, these employ a simple lookup file to affect the overall colour of the game, think filters and post processing / colour grading in films. I used different ones for each of the colour ways in the images above. There are tons of LUTs available on the web for free and they are tiny files that take seconds to try on the fly. Chuck in stuff like bloom, mist and film grain and the possibilities expand exponentially.

There's one effect I really like which recreates the phenomenon one has of looking out from shadow into brightly lit areas on a sunny day, one's eyes take a little time to adjust and the brightness reduces a little as our pupils contract. I think it's called adaptive lighting or adaptive bloom, something like that. 

Thanks! I tried it out just yesterday. Installed fine and smoothly. For a start I selected SweetFX and then messed with various things like the AA stuff. DoF didn´t work, no matter what I´d tried setting in various data fields and menues (all black screen). So turned it off again then. Reshade also did a blurry and blooming mess of all CM menues. And after quitting the game, I got parts of my Win10 desktop flickering. Got to solve this by starting another game, ARMA3 in this example then quitting again. For now I´d removed reshade stuff from my CMRT folder again (zipped it all up for later use). Til I get a better understanding of all of this. But what I´ve seen thus far, I liked! And yes adaptive bloom looked quite intense, but think in my menues it was named HDR? Or is that something different? Anway....soo many choices and so lil time for all of that ATM.

[Lucky_Strike]

32 minutes ago, RockinHarry said:

Thanks! I tried it out just yesterday. Installed fine and smoothly. For a start I selected SweetFX and then messed with various things like the AA stuff. DoF didn´t work, no matter what I´d tried setting in various data fields and menues (all black screen). So turned it off again then. Reshade also did a blurry and blooming mess of all CM menues. And after quitting the game, I got parts of my Win10 desktop flickering. Got to solve this by starting another game, ARMA3 in this example then quitting again. For now I´d removed reshade stuff from my CMRT folder again (zipped it all up for later use). Til I get a better understanding of all of this. But what I´ve seen thus far, I liked! And yes adaptive bloom looked quite intense, but think in my menues it was named HDR? Or is that something different? Anway....soo many choices and so lil time for all of that ATM.

Heheh, yes CM reacts in a very psychedelic way to ReShade .

I think it's the Home button to bring up the ReShade interface and the End button to toggle it on and off. You can customise just about everything to make it work just how you like. And yes there are tons of options. I chucked out all the shaders that either don't work in CM or that do things I'm uninterested in just to narrow it down a bit.

Because CM is not a modern game the GUI is tied into the game very closely, so ReShade will affect it as well as the actual gameplay. What you need to do is to create a mask for your screen which is like an alpha channel so that the GUI elements are masked from the effects - don't forget the compass and small area for the display text at the top. This means you can have your game running without losing the GUI. The mask looks something like this:

Do a screen capture of your whole screen with a CM game running at your normal play resolution, then convert it to greyscale and draw over the areas you need masked, the fuzzy one is a softer mask just for the important game text. Save it as a png, then it needs to go into a folder within your game .exe folder - textures or something like that. It has to be activated by a specific masking shader - there are also masking shaders for making stuff like black strips top and bottom for a cinematic widescreen look.

The DoF uses a kind of mask as well, but one that is already in the game to determine areas of focus/depth. As the game engine is relatively primitive, it's only got about three - near, middle and far - finding the boundaries and making adjustments is the key. I'll try to do a few screen grabs later to show you how it might work with the specific shaders I use.

I steered clear of much of the AA stuff as it's quite heavy on the GPU so needs one with a lot of grunt to do the work. 

Good thing, as you discovered, is that it's very easy to uninstall or disable, and can't do any damage to your game installations as it's self contained.

[RockinHarry]

47 minutes ago, Lucky_Strike said:

Heheh, yes CM reacts in a very psychedelic way to ReShade .

I think it's the Home button to bring up the ReShade interface and the End button to toggle it on and off. You can customise just about everything to make it work just how you like. And yes there are tons of options. I chucked out all the shaders that either don't work in CM or that do things I'm uninterested in just to narrow it down a bit.

Because CM is not a modern game the GUI is tied into the game very closely, so ReShade will affect it as well as the actual gameplay. What you need to do is to create a mask for your screen which is like an alpha channel so that the GUI elements are masked from the effects - don't forget the compass and small area for the display text at the top. This means you can have your game running without losing the GUI. The mask looks something like this:

Do a screen capture of your whole screen with a CM game running at your normal play resolution, then convert it to greyscale and draw over the areas you need masked, the fuzzy one is a softer mask just for the important game text. Save it as a png, then it needs to go into a folder within your game .exe folder - textures or something like that. It has to be activated by a specific masking shader - there are also masking shaders for making stuff like black strips top and bottom for a cinematic widescreen look.

The DoF uses a kind of mask as well, but one that is already in the game to determine areas of focus/depth. As the game engine is relatively primitive, it's only got about three - near, middle and far - finding the boundaries and making adjustments is the key. I'll try to do a few screen grabs later to show you how it might work with the specific shaders I use.

I steered clear of much of the AA stuff as it's quite heavy on the GPU so needs one with a lot of grunt to do the work. 

Good thing, as you discovered, is that it's very easy to uninstall or disable, and can't do any damage to your game installations as it's self contained.

Thanks! (run out of likes again) Woah.. that´s lots of stuff indeed. Guess I´d just activate for screenshots then anyway. Though could do lots of these in GIMP as well and I´m fairly well aquainted with it. Hm... will see......

Yep it´s "Pos1" on my keyboard activating menues but "end" was what I was looking for when my brain started melting. 

[Artkin]

For reshade I just bind a key to enable or disable effects. You can find this as the second hotkey in the settings section. I bound mine to "insert", right next to "home" to open reshade settings in the first place. This bind is extremely useful.

AMD fidelity is one of the most useful options in reshade IMO. It brings out the detail from textures like no other.

I also use FXAA, MXAO, and a couple others that I forget.

I use bloom too, but around a .6-7 depending on the version of bloom that you use (There are a bunch).

I also use an effect called "FGFX ::LSPOirr" and it makes a pretty nice night time effect

 

Edited October 24, 2022 by Artkin

[Lucky_Strike]

5 hours ago, RockinHarry said:

Though could do lots of these in GIMP as well and I´m fairly well aquainted with it. Hm... will see......

Well that's useful in itself as a lot of the shaders use terms you'll be familiar with, many are based on the common language of photo editing and colour grading apps.

5 hours ago, RockinHarry said:

Yep it´s "Pos1" on my keyboard activating menues but "end" was what I was looking for when my brain started melting. 

Heheh, yes every time I use ReShade I have to remind myself to switch it off when I finished so as not to have a psychedelic experience next time I fire up the game.

[Lucky_Strike]

5 hours ago, Artkin said:

For reshade I just bind a key to enable or disable effects. You can find this as the second hotkey in the settings section. I bound mine to "insert", right next to "home" to open reshade settings in the first place. This bind is extremely useful.

AMD fidelity is one of the most useful options in reshade IMO. It brings out the detail from textures like no other.

I also use FXAA, MXAO, and a couple others that I forget.

I use bloom too, but around a .6-7 depending on the version of bloom that you use (There are a bunch).

I also use an effect called "FGFX ::LSPOirr" and it makes a pretty nice night time effect

 

Absolutely, I have my on/off keybinding set to the end key. I think the default is an F key or something.

I'm guessing AMD fidelity is for AMD GPUs. Bloom as you say has many variations but is certainly one to experiment with, great for so many situations and actually works quite well in CM.

FGFX ::LSPOirr catchy name! There are some very interesting night vision fx that can be made, or are ready made, great for modern warfare titles I would imagine.

[Artkin]

2 hours ago, Lucky_Strike said:

Absolutely, I have my on/off keybinding set to the end key. I think the default is an F key or something.

I'm guessing AMD fidelity is for AMD GPUs. Bloom as you say has many variations but is certainly one to experiment with, great for so many situations and actually works quite well in CM.

FGFX ::LSPOirr catchy name! There are some very interesting night vision fx that can be made, or are ready made, great for modern warfare titles I would imagine.

AMD fidelity works fine on my Nvidia gpu. It's one of the best effects I think. Bloom is a must for me, I don't even bother with levels when I use Bloom.

Lol yeah IDK what FGFX is exactly but it just makes the night darker. It seems much more realistic for the countryside, or in places where there isnt electrical lighting. 

I'm not talking about night vision, but therw are effects for that too, though sort of annoying. 

[RockinHarry]

9 hours ago, Artkin said:

For reshade I just bind a key to enable or disable effects. You can find this as the second hotkey in the settings section. I bound mine to "insert", right next to "home" to open reshade settings in the first place. This bind is extremely useful.

AMD fidelity is one of the most useful options in reshade IMO. It brings out the detail from textures like no other.

I also use FXAA, MXAO, and a couple others that I forget.

I use bloom too, but around a .6-7 depending on the version of bloom that you use (There are a bunch).

I also use an effect called "FGFX ::LSPOirr" and it makes a pretty nice night time effect

 

2 hours ago, Artkin said:

AMD fidelity works fine on my Nvidia gpu. It's one of the best effects I think. Bloom is a must for me, I don't even bother with levels when I use Bloom.

Lol yeah IDK what FGFX is exactly but it just makes the night darker. It seems much more realistic for the countryside, or in places where there isnt electrical lighting. 

I'm not talking about night vision, but therw are effects for that too, though sort of annoying. 

Thanks! Some more things I can try out immediately and don´t need wasting time fiddling, when time is needed elsewhere ATM.

4 hours ago, Lucky_Strike said:

Well that's useful in itself as a lot of the shaders use terms you'll be familiar with, many are based on the common language of photo editing and colour grading apps.

Exactly.

4 hours ago, Lucky_Strike said:

Heheh, yes every time I use ReShade I have to remind myself to switch it off when I finished so as not to have a psychedelic experience next time I fire up the game.

lol, yes.

Now with having HH in place for CMRT summer 44 and loving it.... do you plan on autumn and winter versions as well (for any the WW2 games)? Tagging the summer set for use in springtime germany 45 I can do myself though. Now with autumn I get reminded (again), we need a beautiful CM autumn set as well. Both for CMFB and CMRT.

Aah.. and just noticed you´d already included some Reshade presets with HH. Overlooked that somehow.

Edited October 25, 2022 by RockinHarry

[Artkin]

Hey, sharing knowledge is what it's all about in this tight corner of the internet. 

[Lucky_Strike]

10 hours ago, Artkin said:

AMD fidelity works fine on my Nvidia gpu. It's one of the best effects I think. Bloom is a must for me, I don't even bother with levels when I use Bloom.

Lol yeah IDK what FGFX is exactly but it just makes the night darker. It seems much more realistic for the countryside, or in places where there isnt electrical lighting. 

I'm not talking about night vision, but therw are effects for that too, though sort of annoying. 

I'll have to give these a try next time I fire up ReShade. I don't remember seeing either AMD fidelity or FGFX, they might be from newer versions of ReShade than I have installed. Always cautious of updating ReShade as there are so many things that change it just gets a bit overwhelming and time-consuming to reset everything to how I like it. For one or two shaders though it should be quite trivial to install a newer version and test them, then go back to the previous.

Edited October 25, 2022 by Lucky_Strike

[Lucky_Strike]

8 hours ago, RockinHarry said:

Now with having HH in place for CMRT summer 44 and loving it.... do you plan on autumn and winter versions as well (for any the WW2 games)? Tagging the summer set for use in springtime germany 45 I can do myself though. Now with autumn I get reminded (again), we need a beautiful CM autumn set as well. Both for CMFB and CMRT.

Aah.. and just noticed you´d already included some Reshade presets with HH. Overlooked that somehow.

Autumn, winter, spring, everywhere - yes my plan was always to do a full set of vegetation for all the WW2 titles. Much of it can be ported across between titles so it's a little less work than it might seem. FI is the biggest challenge, the sheer breadth of seasons and climate variations is daunting. I tried HH in FI and, although it works well for some things, it was obvious that it fell short for much of the terrain. If I avoid doing ground textures which are already quite well covered, then it's really the trees and crops that would be most time consuming. Grasses tend to look similar across the wider  European theatre, weeds, brush and flowers change a bit, whilst hedgerows and bocage will also need some work.

I did start RT but had to stop for a while. However now that I'm back into using Blender I can resume my work on trees and bocage. Probably what I'll do is a second version of HH with new tree models and revised bocage as well as some extras for the Low Countries and the Market Garden operations. Then the proper RT summer set. After that making the autumn/winter/spring sets will be easier, though snow covered stuff represents a bit of a problem which I have yet to resolve to my satisfaction. FI will borrow from all the rest with extras like olive trees and vineyards ...

So that's me busy for the next decade , probably just in time for CMx3.

As for the ReShade presets in HH, I should probably replace them or not include them, they are pretty old now and I doubt they will give the intended results in the latest version.

[NPye]

The Big Boss has landed.

Edited October 25, 2022 by NPye

[RockinHarry]

3 hours ago, Lucky_Strike said:

I'll have to give these a try next time I fire up ReShade. I don't remember seeing either AMD fidelity or FGFX, they might be from newer versions of ReShade than I have installed. Always cautious of updating ReShade as there are so many things that change it just gets a bit overwhelming and time-consuming to reset everything to how I like it. For one or two shaders though it should be quite trivial to install a newer version and test them, then go back to the previous.

Think I´ve seen AMD fidelity and FGFX in SweetFX package in my install of latest available Reshade. Haven´t tried yet as well.

[Artkin]

Ah yeah I installed all the effects. Worth it.

[RockinHarry]

4 hours ago, Lucky_Strike said:

Autumn, winter, spring, everywhere - yes my plan was always to do a full set of vegetation for all the WW2 titles. Much of it can be ported across between titles so it's a little less work than it might seem. FI is the biggest challenge, the sheer breadth of seasons and climate variations is daunting. I tried HH in FI and, although it works well for some things, it was obvious that it fell short for much of the terrain. If I avoid doing ground textures which are already quite well covered, then it's really the trees and crops that would be most time consuming. Grasses tend to look similar across the wider  European theatre, weeds, brush and flowers change a bit, whilst hedgerows and bocage will also need some work.

I did start RT but had to stop for a while. However now that I'm back into using Blender I can resume my work on trees and bocage. Probably what I'll do is a second version of HH with new tree models and revised bocage as well as some extras for the Low Countries and the Market Garden operations. Then the proper RT summer set. After that making the autumn/winter/spring sets will be easier, though snow covered stuff represents a bit of a problem which I have yet to resolve to my satisfaction. FI will borrow from all the rest with extras like olive trees and vineyards ...

So that's me busy for the next decade , probably just in time for CMx3.

As for the ReShade presets in HH, I should probably replace them or not include them, they are pretty old now and I doubt they will give the intended results in the latest version.

I can very well imagine what hell a lot of work that all is! But very cool you went that far with what you finished and published already. Just yesterday when (re-) installing HH in CMBN I wondered about seeing XMas trees in my YEG´s mission pine forests. Just then I went to HH´s folder structure and noticed the many variations of terrain types you added. So then took me some time to sort things I wanted see on this map. Yet also got to match with the mission´s own little mod set and replace things with your better textures. One easily can get lost with all this, but it´s cool.

As for CMRT (and CMBN) other seasons I´ll likely do required mod tags on my own if this makes HH files available where I want them to. My current focus is CMBN/CMFB autumn (hurtgen forest related stuff) and springtime CMRT. There I´d need appropriately textured trees and other foliage. Also some the forest floor and grasses would be fine with fallen leaves added to them. I might try layering some with my own collection of nature stuff, either from the net or those I photo shooted myself when traveling my homeland. I´ll see.

Re HH reshade presets, they don´t seem to work for me. Nothing happens when loaded. But could be ini (or other files) are not at the right place yet.

Anyway... with HH and Reshade it´s now quite a different CM experience and I love it! So again, big thanks for all your efforts and help you provided thus far. The voyage ain´t over yet and hopefully we get all wanted things done before game engine X makes it all obsolete.

[JM Stuff]

5 hours ago, NPye said:

The Big Boss has landed.

Perhaps,  but I dont see to you the efficient good black smoke its a shame...

This is the big boss !

 

JM

 

[Artkin]

4 hours ago, RockinHarry said:

Re HH reshade presets, they don´t seem to work for me. Nothing happens when loaded. But could be ini (or other files) are not at the right place yet.

Do you mean Herrtom's presets? I couldn't get them to work with my Reshade as well, despite having all the effects and the HerrtomReshade.ini (Whatever it was called).

[Lucky_Strike]

9 hours ago, NPye said:

The Big Boss has landed.

Nice one! Like the texturing on the mantle.

[Lucky_Strike]

7 hours ago, RockinHarry said:

Think I´ve seen AMD fidelity and FGFX in SweetFX package in my install of latest available Reshade. Haven´t tried yet as well.

I think SweetFX used to be a stand-alone app in itself some years ago. I'm definitely going to try the latest version of ReShade.

[Lucky_Strike]

5 hours ago, RockinHarry said:

I can very well imagine what hell a lot of work that all is! But very cool you went that far with what you finished and published already. Just yesterday when (re-) installing HH in CMBN I wondered about seeing XMas trees in my YEG´s mission pine forests. Just then I went to HH´s folder structure and noticed the many variations of terrain types you added. So then took me some time to sort things I wanted see on this map. Yet also got to match with the mission´s own little mod set and replace things with your better textures. One easily can get lost with all this, but it´s cool.

Yes, I do wonder if it's actually doable. Once I get stuck in I really enjoy it so what the hell I'm gonna try anyway.

Christmas trees ... that reminds me ...

 

Now if only there was some way to light it up and put a nice warm glow in the windows of the church and cottage it would look idyllic.

6 hours ago, RockinHarry said:

As for CMRT (and CMBN) other seasons I´ll likely do required mod tags on my own if this makes HH files available where I want them to. My current focus is CMBN/CMFB autumn (hurtgen forest related stuff) and springtime CMRT. There I´d need appropriately textured trees and other foliage. Also some the forest floor and grasses would be fine with fallen leaves added to them. I might try layering some with my own collection of nature stuff, either from the net or those I photo shooted myself when traveling my homeland. I´ll see.

There are some very good free resources out there on the web for textures, so I say go for it. Customising it to your personal taste is what it's all about. If you want any of my original layered files give me a shout.

Now is certainly the time to get out and take some pictures of fallen leaves. 

6 hours ago, RockinHarry said:

Re HH reshade presets, they don´t seem to work for me. Nothing happens when loaded. But could be ini (or other files) are not at the right place yet.

Yeah presets can be a bit of a problem if the version of ReShade is different (newer). Lots of the fx may have been replaced or superseded. Even on my PC some of my older presets don't seem to load the complete set of FX.

6 hours ago, RockinHarry said:

Anyway... with HH and Reshade it´s now quite a different CM experience and I love it! So again, big thanks for all your efforts and help you provided thus far. The voyage ain´t over yet and hopefully we get all wanted things done before game engine X makes it all obsolete.

Thanks Harry, you're more than welcome. And yes, I'm determined to get this one finished.