Graphics Plugin Full + Next-Gen Shader 4.01 Beta

Introducing the development branch for the new Graphics Plugin for HS2 (AIGirl).

This product is subscription-based. You will receive monthly updates with new features. Any ideas or feature suggestions are highly appreciated.

So it' already a version 1.0.0. I was trying my best to fix as much bugs as possible and offer you a stable solution. I would like to thank you for the continuous support of this one, hope more users will participate in it.

HOW TO USE

• Unzip into root folder.
• Unzip Textures & Skybox zip into root folder.
• May need to reset folder paths in F1 Plugin Settings menu. It will auto set correct paths.
• Also, reset the default presets in 'Presets' Tab to have correct values.

How to use ASCII:

• Use preset (Easy way)

Manually:

• Enable ASCII Fx Before Post Processing
• Disable Anti Aliasing
• Use Legacy Bloom with 0 Treshold and high Intensity
• Use Color Grading (LDR Lut Reccomended) - adjust brightness if needed.
• Setup Lights. Due to nature of the effect it tends to darken the screen. So you might need extreme light Intensity to compensate it.

How to render ASCII:

• You actually need to render it in 4k to looks good. If you don't have 4k native resolution use F11 screenshot with Upsampling

CREDITS

• Hanaaa & 2B Enjoyer for help with testing and small fixes.
• DonkeyDungeon for Chinese translation.

CHANGE LOG

1.2.0

• This version comes with Next-Gen Shaders 4.0 Beta! This is an initial BETA version of the shaders and contains all required modifications to make new shadows and SEGI working correctly. Plus new hair dithering. This is temporary version and won't be updated. I plan to release 4+ version as stand alone product when I'll finish integrate all new features, then I will release v3 for FREE, you can purchase the new v4 or stay on Beta versions.
• Next-Gen Soft Shadows support. New shadow shader replacing internal shadows. Enable it in the 'Settings' Tab.
• Screen-Space Shadows. New screen-space contact shadows. Enable it in the 'Settings' Tab
  
• SEGI support for Next-Gen shaders. So, finally you can use SEGI on the character, but the downside is extra performance impact.
• Fixed old annoying bug with CTAA was not applied to SSS shaders and caused edge outlines. Now this working correctly. Also I've reverted back the CINA_SOFT and CINA_ULTRA. Now it's working correctly and doing the actual pre/post upscale as intended instead of upscaling the whole image. To make this AA actually smoothing the edges you need to set Temporal Jitter Scale to 0.5. New option here is FILTER DITHERING - so if you using Clothing shaders 4 and Next-Gen 4 Beta it can do nice filtering.

  

  

  

• Pixelize effects has been combines into one effect.
• Cubemaps Caching. This is an essential change Graphics plugin helps to greatly optimize Graphics Plugin loading times. When you loading a game there was very huge memory load by generating previews for every cubemap that you have in the folder. Lets say you have 10Gb of cubemaps - and it took up to few minutes to process all of that. Now it's solved by caching the thumbnails - so on your first launch it will generate previews for every cubemap and saves it in the folder. On the next launches it will reuse generated previews instead of generating them - this saves tons of memory and loading time up to 200-500%. Every new cubemap you will add to the older will be cached on the first launch.

1.1.0

• New effects: Edge Detection with 6 different algorithms. Roberts/Neon, Sobel/Neon, Scharr/Neon.
• New effect - ASCII Fx - the effect similar to dithering, but using ASCII symbols. Can do nice retro style renders. Can be used in two variants - 'Before Post Processing' (recommended) and 'After Post Processing'. the nature of the effect may require some special setup - may need to use extreme legacy Bloom with 0 threshold plus extreme brightness and saturation in color grading to looks good. There is also a preset file if you want to setup it in one click.
• New effect - Sharpen comes with 3 different versions. Can output good result with ASCII Fx actually. But I don't, recommend to use it in regular rendering much, because any sharpening tends to expose artifacts.
• Glitch RGB Split versions has been merged into one solid effect.
• Glitch Image Block versions also has been merged into single effect. These two effects can be used in same time now.
• Fixed the Anti-Aliasing Tab and SEGI Tab preventing the main window from moving.
• Amplify Occlusion's buttons "Apply Mode" and "Per Pixel Normals" now gets disabled depending on the Rendering Mode (Deferred/Forward).
• Fixed the Amplify Occlusion Bilateral Filter button update bug. Now correctly reacting to checkbox state.
• MSAA now correctly disabled in deferred mode
• New feature - Chromatic Aberration now have a 'Spectral Lut' option, which controls the aberration colors.
• New Chinese translation. Now covers the most of the new features. Thanks to the user DonkeyDungeon for the contribution. (If you want to contribute the translation to your language too please let me know).
• Fixed 'DefaultReflectionProbe' Importance, which was preventing the baked reflection probes from displaying.
• UI toolbar has rearranged. Reflection Probes has been moved to the separate 'Probes' tab due to extreme overloading of the Lighting tab section.
• 'Lighting' tab has been renamed to 'Environment'. To improve readability and miss understanding with Lighting-Lights tabs.
• Environment tab content has been rearranged. Now you can correctly adjust the 'Trilight' and 'Flat' colors. Sliders belonged to Skybox (intensity, exposure, rotation) moved to skybox section to save more space.
• Selection (Buttons) bug preventing the element below the selection from disabling has been fixes.
• Factory defaults now built-in into the binary. If you just drag and drop only the .dll (without 'Resources' folder) can correctly reset the defaults to the correct state. Which I recommend to do.
• Small UI adjustments: new hints and description in the Anti aliasing tabs. Improved the scaling for 1080p displays.
• Fixed a bug preventing some effects from the correct saving when the value was 0.
• Fixed some incorrect post processing effects ordering.
• Disabled the CTAA spamming 'super sampling 0' messages.
• Preset Inspector UI has been revised. Now, only can allowing to save/reset the current game mode preset for improved readability and avoid miss clicks. But, you can use Settings - Advanced Settings checkbox to unlock all default presets targets.
• Improved all default presets. In case of bugs consider to reset all preset.

1.0.0

• Amplify Bloom -> Beautify Bloom. Due to some core problems with the transparent objects (pantyhose, eyelashes, eyeshadows and alpha shaders). I've decided to replace it with the newer similar solution, based on the same algorithms that can work correctly. The basic functionality is the same, but unfortunately it still lacks some features like streaks and Lens Flares, but still 100% worth it.
• Sun Flares is actually a major feature as a part of the Beautify Bloom. It can draw a sun, halo, ghosts and rays on the screen. You can use it with any regular skybox.
• AgX Tonemapper. This is a new color grading feature, that was introduced in Blender 4.0 as a main color management profile. It provides better color handling in over-exposed areas compared to Neutral, and better dynamics than ACES (which is very dark and tents to alter the colors). In particular bright colors go towards white, similar to real cameras. It has multiple contrast profiles, from very high contrast like ACES to lower contrast like Neutral. I recommend to use instead of any other one, first, you need to select the contrast profile (Base\High\Low) and then adjust the Saturation, Tint and brightness if needed. It will produce very realistic and cinematic looks without color clipping and color alteration of bright objects. Works especially good with the new bloom effect.
• Light Leaks - a simple Image Effect simulates the camera light leaks.
• Bugfix: this is less knows problem was reported by the user - TheEND. Before, if you save a scene file with cubemap skybox it will load ok on your computer, but if you download a scene file that was saved on different machine (with different game folder) it won't load a skybox even if you have it in your folder because it's saves the absolute path to it (D:/.../Games/HS2/..). Same for the lens dirts textures. Now it correctly loads a file paths to the cubemaps and lens dirts textures if you loading a scene from another user. Now the plugin will correctly load a scene with cubemap (if you have it in your 'cubemap' folder) and lens dirt texture.
• Bugfix: There was a problem with CTAA Anti Aliasing. Switching to AA Tab with enabled CTAA after saving or loading a preset was causing a window crush, now it's fixed. And also, I've removed the Supersampling Modes from CTAA, because in old versions of the plugin it was working incorrectly anyway and in newer versions CINA_ULTRA and CINA_SOFT caused a huge performance drops. CTAA is the best possible AA solution but still have small issues with SSS shaders, hopefully I can fix it in future updates. Thanks user Hanaa for the comissions and help with dealing with this one.
• GTAO now have debug modes.
• I know some users complain about the inability to use different AO modes at the same time. Using multiple is still bad idea in my opinion, but I didn't noticed a problem behind it. Actually, only Legacy provides 100% support for all objects, but it's really bad. I'm currently looking for solution, and will introduce it in next update with the help of the external plugin. or I will revert back the ability to use different AOs at the same time.

0.9.0

• SunShaftsHDR - now can automatically connect to Sun position on AIO Sky and Procedural Sky by enabling Use Global Sun checkbox. (Sun source should be selected)
• Fixed the bug preventing correct save\load AIOSkyV2 function. You can now save all settings while using AIO Sky.
• Dithered Shadows function. You can go to the Settings - SHADOWS and set Dithered Shadows checkbox and adjust the shadow smoothness.
• 9 New Glitch screen effects
• 3 New Pixelize screen effects.
• CRT Screen effect.

0.8.0

• Underwater Rendering - New post process effect simulates camera underwater. Requires LuxWater Water Volume props to work. (see Extra Mods included). Also, see demo scenes.
• ShinySSRR - New screen-space raytraced reflections effect.
• Only one AO effect can be applied at the time to maintain performance and correct looks.

0.7.0

• Tilt Shift Bokeh Effect - New post process effect simulates camera tilt shift with nice bokeh effect.
• Amplify Bloom HDR - Unfortunately, new bloom doesn't work properly in 0.6. There is a major issue with HDR-LDR conversion, so I made a hot-fix for this, but currently it have one downside - Not working for transparent objects. I already found a proper solution, but it may takes a a lot of work, so expect in future updates. So, in conclusion - 0.7.0 update it will support HDR but will not be working for alpha shaders. Currently you can set the render queue of the transparent object to 2000-2450 to make it work correctly with the Bloom effect.
• Sun Shafts HDR - same for the Sun Shafts. Built-in version have problems with HDR, and I've fixed it. Now can be accessed from the Graphics menu. For the source, currently you can Use Position vector to set the ray source - just put some object where you need it, and then copy its X Y Z position. ( after that object can be deleted/toggled off).
• Cubemaps Ground Projection - new function can project cubemap on the virtual ground. Helps to fight the "floating in nowhere" look. Ofc, this only works for the cubemaps with the strong horizon line, not quite suitable for indoor ones.
• Ambient Occlusion now have a tab structure to save some UI space. Also I've introduced new AO - Amplify AO. This probably similar to GTAO but with more flexible controls and debug. Also output more smooth result. Don't use more than one AO at the same time.
• Other small scale fixes and UI improvements.
• I've made a pack of new demo scenes with adjusted lighting. You can use it in your renders.

0.6.0

• New remastered UI and quality of life features. Now supports bigger font sizes for 4K screens, providing better clarity and composition.
• New dynamic skybox support - AIOskybox/V2. You can control and adjust the settings in the main window. The cube files are separate and included inside the archive.
• New post-process feature - Amplify Bloom. A powerful tool with various screen space effects, such as Lens Glare and Lens Starbursts. Textures for starbursts and lens dirts are included.
• SEGI Remastered. This feature has been moved to a separate GI section. The performance and optimization of this effect have been greatly improved. Additionally, the state can now be correctly saved to the scene file. This allows you to easily share your awesome scene with others, ensuring they experience the same lighting setup as you.
• Bug fix for CTAA. Previously, there was a bug with mismatching screen resolution. Note: CTAA may increase the screen size significantly, so it is not recommended. Use "STANDARD" instead.
• Now correctly working with some maps that have a built-in Post-processing profile, such as Viking Village.
• Now correctly finds the file path to the cubemap and other folders. Go to F1 Settings to reset the file paths.