A Different Kind of Screenshot

[BillDent]

I wanted to enter this in the monthly contest but I don't think it qualifies because I took a picture of my monitor instead of doing a screen capture. I love how it turned out though. It's straight from the running sim. The only addition is the artifact of my room light reflecting on the top of the monitor that gives the impression of a warm street lamp style light outside the aircraft. This is the Seattle Project 777-200ER departing from KBOS on a rainy night. Had to share.

[Thorsten]

If you want to share screenshots, I suppose you have to set permissions accordingly.

Your client does not have permission to get URL /EwLQ3QeiGRlODp_3rLubMHoAZ4Drn_NvoLO2BOkYhwIye0ZoT9xjzDO0oau94LMBR6FvdTRI=w1920-h983 from this server

[BillDent]

[legoboyvdlp]

Well, that looks pretty nice, and like a real picture. You could post it to reddit /flightsim and see if they guess if it is real or fake
I like how the PFD etc kind of emmit a lot of light. Very good job!

[Catalanoic]

Yes, that photo off the screen looks really realistic, i was wondering if we can have a ALS filter to see a simulated effect on FG.

[icecode]

That looks really nice, I'm getting that real life feeling too.

i was wondering if we can have a ALS filter to see a simulated effect on FG.

I don't think ALS would be able to do that properly (or at least efficiently). Rembrandt already does glow and film grain effects. Don't forget that Rembrandt is still available and can be used for a more "cinematic" look at closer distances.

[Thorsten]

I don't think ALS would be able to do that properly (or at least efficiently).

The HUD filter does that sort of thing (slight blur, de-saturate colors in the bright areas) - I haven't thought of applying it to a (PFD-like) canvas surface, but it'd probably work the same.

[Thorsten]

I leave it up to you whether ALS can do this or not...





Two different variants of a blur/desaturation Kernel run over the MDU canvas - for comparison the default rendered instrument to the right.

[icecode]

I take back what I've said, that looks even better than Rembrandt! Are you blending the blur output and the original color or just using the blurred output? For readability it'd be nice to control the amount of blur/desaturation used.

[Thorsten]

The center component of the blur kernel is the original texture, and all weights of the sampling points are adjustible - so in a sense I am blending blur and original, though all happens in one go.

Currently this is fully configurable (distance steps and weights of the blur Kernel,...) - I need to settle on a scheme I like and boil that down to one parameter, then it can be switched on and off according to brightness and ambient light, the idea being that in low light you have to dial down screen brightness for better readability.

[icecode]

I need to settle on a scheme I like and boil that down to one parameter

Maybe you can combine it with the ALS filters stuff (gamma and brightness) and unify everything into a HDR/tone mapping feature.

[Thorsten]

I'm not sure what you have in mind - given that we're still working in a forward renderer and blur can only work on the same texture sheet within a region of continuous uv-mapping.

Magic I can do, but miracles are a bit tough...

Edit: Here's another test for a DPS display - looks sure promising...

[icecode]

You can do tone mapping and gamma correction in forward rendering. In fact it's already been done in FG by yourself. What I meant is to unify your ALS filters and make them depend on a single parameter (probably exposure). That parameter can be changed dynamically by an eye adaptation to light algorithm or manually tweaked. The blur and desaturation can depend on that parameter too.

I'll show it myself once I have more time in my hands.

[Thorsten]

Ah, okay - that was the original idea when introducing the filtering - I just never actually got around to do it. And these days people seem to have so much fun taking vastly over-exposed shots...