Game developer Deep Dives is an ongoing chain with a goal of lighting the specific design, art, or technical characteristics within a video game, to show how simple, fundamental design decisions are not really simple at all.
Earlier installments are covered topics like cover topics Avatar Sound Design: Frontiers of Pendora, Camera Effects, Sound FX, and VFX created a smooth and high octane movement system in Eco Point NovaAnd this Technical process behind bringing bicycles: Frontier for Unreal Editor for Fortnite,
Hey everyone, my name is Matt, I am Solo Dev behind Lushfil Photography SIM, which is a newly released Trancuel Photography game. For this project I wanted to make a real fake DSLR camera for the satisfaction of photographers and hopefully let new people learn more about camera settings.
Most standard effects of the camera such as the depth of the field, focal length, exposure and noise are all easily simulated in unrealistic engine. An effect that was missing, had the ability to recreate long exposure, a standard feature of high grade cameras that allow you to leave the shutter open and capture a full range of speed in an image. I did not see it in the first game engine, so I wanted to give it my best shot.
Final in-game effect:
Image via Matt Nevel/Annapurna Interactive.
Image via Matt Nevel/Annapurna Interactive.
The approach I created was purely based on mathematics. Real cameras do not work in “frames” or “ticks”, so the in-engine solution will have to take images over time and compile them on top of each other. The combination of all these images will definitely be very bright, so I made different ways to adjust the exposure and appearance until I landed on the right result. I will try and describe the approach taken by me in each attempt, what went wrong, and how I got the right solution.
First attempt:
If I took images in a long exposure period of a second, I had 30 images. My first idea was to combine these 30 images together, and divided the final result by 30. This was what it looked:
Image via Matt Nevel/Annapurna Interactive.
Image via Matt Nevel/Annapurna Interactive.
We had a correct spot effect, but there were some clear problems. Initially all 30 images were mixed together and some were actually performed as a result of high values, which was clamp before the 30th partition.
Second attempt:
After this, I tried to solve the glow every time when the frame was added. I thought if you add 1+1, divide by 2, you will get the correct exposure of 1.
Image via Matt Nevel/Annapurna Interactive.
Image via Matt Nevel/Annapurna Interactive.
The problem with this was that images that were finalized would have a strong weight compared to the images taken earlier. This is as a result of a major final image, out of the ratio of whites and darkness.
Third attempt (winning combination):
The solution was to use the same method as the previous effort, but instead of dividing by 2, I will divide by the total number of images in the sequence. The second frame will be divided by 2, the 12th frame will be divided by 12, which will give each frame a reasonable weight.
Image via Matt Nevel/Annapurna Interactive.
Image via Matt Nevel/Annapurna Interactive.
Then I increased the number of captures to 30 frames per second to get an accurate spot without doing too much on the performance.
After receiving these output shots in-engine, I was thrilled. There is some more lifetime about an incomplete image, which is staining and full of motion, making these shots so real. I added some additional layers of implementation to control the player how long the shutter would remain open, and it would be fully compatible with ‘M’ manual mode, and will correctly affect other camera settings.
I was not sure I would be able to achieve this effect, but I am really happy that I spent time to use, and was able to be lucky. I hope that all enthusiastic photographers will appreciate being able to play this effect.
Image via Matt Nevel/Annapurna Interactive.
Image via Matt Nevel/Annapurna Interactive.
Image via Matt Nevel/Annapurna Interactive.
Please consider checking Succulent photography sim On steam, epic, playstation and Xbox! You can get my social media accounts Here,
