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Essentials v4 - SuperShot/SuperVideo
🕑 Added 2020-08-09 20:30:16 +0000 UTCThese are your most essential MacGruber tools in a convenient single VAR package. Version 4 introduces two new plugins, SuperShot and SuperVideo, which replace the old SuperResolution plugin and bring a huge amount of improvements over the old plugin.
Overview
- SkyMagic: Allows you to create cubemaps within VaM to be used for customized global illumination and ReflectionProbes. This can immensely improve shiny materials like metal, latex, leather, etc.
- SuperShot + SuperVideo: Take ultra-high resolution screenshots or use super-sampling to for your screenshots or recorded video. This improves image quality a LOT, especially shadows and hair, but also textures. Make sure to look at the above comparison image in native resolution, not the thumbnail. Pixel size has been increased by 200% to make the improvement more obvious. SuperShot (formerly SuperResolution) is the de facto standard for VaM screenshots.
- FrameRateControl: This plugin allows more fine control over VaM's VSync settings and framerate. Especially recommended when recording video or you want to reduce power usage or fan noise when working with VaM.
- AudioAttenuation: Improves how audio volume fades over distance. It should be a lot easier to get the volume right with this.
- EditMode: Let VaM automatically switch to 'Edit Mode' on scene load. Just put this on your default scene. When in 'Desktop Mode', it also opens the MainMenu and enables 'Targets' (the green atom icons).
- MSAAToggle: Hotkeys to toggle VaM's MSAA settings, this helps with Reshade issues.
Changelog for Version 4
- Two new plugins, SuperShot and SuperVideo, replace the old SuperResolution plugin. The plugin has essentially been rewritten from ground up. SuperShot is intended for screenshots. SuperVideo modifies the WindowCamera, intended for video recording by external software like OBS.
- SuperShot: Choose among common aspect ratios: 16:9, 16:10, 21:9, 4:3 and 1:1. Each ratio comes with a list of common resolutions. Of course you can now also take portrait screenshots in inverted ratios such as 9:16.
- SuperShot: Instead of just outputting in ultra-high resolution, the plugin can now also super-sample the screenshot for you. Quality-wise this is almost identical with downscaling in GIMP, although its done on the GPU. With the old plugin the bottleneck was always saving the large image as JPG on disk, which took a second or so while freezing VaM. If you only need the normal sized shot, this is now MUCH MUCH faster! For supersampling you have the choice between Linear (Blurring) and Lanczos3 (Sharpening) and resolution multipliers 2x, 3x and 4x. Internal texture size is limited to 8192x8192.
- SuperShot: You have the choice now between saving as PNG (Quality) and JPG (Filesize).
- SuperShot: The build-in VaM screenshot tool has been modified with a much larger preview (freely scalable now) as well as support for the different aspect ratio. As an alternative, while in Desktop mode, you can also take screenshots directly from the player perspective.
- SuperShot: Some people mentioned that they had trouble holding their head exactly straight when taking shots in VR. This why you can now "Lock Z Rotation" to make your screenshots exactly level.
- SuperShot: Should someone be annoyed by the flashlight, you can turn it off now.
- SuperShot: Since it might not be that clear for some how much graphics memory is needed, there is now an memory estimation. In the worst cases with everything cranked up, SuperShot can (momentary) need up to 3-6 GB (!!) of graphics memory, excluding VaM itself and your scene. If you get incomplete/black pictures you did probably run out of memory. Please don't complain if this doesn't work on your 2 GB laptop card...
- SuperVideo: Super-samples the WindowCamera with the same options as SuperShot. The output resolution and aspect ratio is always defined by your VaM window. Note that you need a massive rig to record 1920x1080 video with 8xMSAA and 4xSS at a stable 30fps frame rate, my RTX2070 won't do that. However, you can try 2x or 3xSS or lower MSAA.
- SuperVideo: The plugin is intended to be used with the FrameRateControl (also in this package) to sync your framerate with the OBS capture rate. For example record 2x super-sampled FullHD at 30Hz using VSync-Half. (Note that this doesn't work in VR.)
- SuperVideo: Preview image matches the aspect ratio of your VaM window now. By default the preview is always attached right of the WindowCamera atom, you can now center it or shift it to the left, which can be helpful when filming in VR. Preview can also be scaled.
Known issues
- For some reason SuperShot and SuperVideo are not applying effects from PostMagic.
Download
- https://www.patreon.com/posts/essentials-v4-40278678
- This is an EarlyAccess release! Download will be available for free under CC BY-SA license after August 30, 2020. You are allowed to reference these packages in your own VAR packages, even if they are paid or use a different licence. Links to my Patreon are always appreciated.
