Plugins PostMagic

Admin Note: This plugin is specifically made for desktop use and as stated in the description only partially works in VR. If you wish to not have this plugin loaded at all you can permanently disable it from within the "Package Manager".


PostMagic adds post-processing effects to VaM desktop, partially also to VR. Some of the effects have issues or are even marked as experimental.

Note that I stopped working on PostMagic long ago, since it will be obsolete with VaM 2.xx. It would not be useful to make a heavy time investment in this. This is using the 'Post Processing Stack' embedded in VaM, originally provided by Unity Technologies. Also includes a number of LUT textures made by Oeshii.

Version 4 only brings a small improvement to the UserLUT module.





Effects

• UserLUT: Rather simple, but very powerful effect. It uses a LookUpTexture (LUT) to remap colors however you want. You can take a screenshot of the game and load it up in Photoshop, GIMP or whatever you use and apply any color filters and re-mappings you need to achieve what you like.
• Depth of Field: A common post-processing effect that simulates the focus properties of a camera lens. Foreground or background objects can be out of focus and appear blurred. I have also implemented an AutoFocus function, to auto-adjust the FocusDistance. For that you need to place an 'Empty' atom into the scene and name it 'AutoFocusPoint', and attach it to a person head, animate it or whatever.
• Bloom: Another very common effect is Bloom. It makes bright objects "glow".
• Grain: This effect adds some "film grain" noise to your scene. Maybe you want your scene look like some old analog movie?
• Anti-Aliasing: FXAA and TAA: Implements Fast Approximate Anti-Aliasing (FXAA) and Temporal Anti-Aliasing (TAA) algorithms. However, TAA is not supported in VR, I made it to automatically switch to FXAA when in VR. Both algorithms have trouble with VaM's hair, using VaM's own MSAA (at 8x) still produces best results. However, if GPU performance is an issue, you can try to combine some lower MSAA setting with FXAA to get similar results than 8x MSAA, but at higher framerates. TAA can not be combined with MSAA.
• Vignette: Very common effect used by basically any major game. It very slightly darkens (or colors) the corners of the screen, guiding the eyes toward the center. While Vignette technically also works in VR, it doesn't do too well with stereo rendering. In VR you also see this effect a bit in the center of your field of view.
• Chromatic Aberration: An effect resulting from a camera’s lens failing to converge all colors to the same point. It appears as “fringes” of color along boundaries that separate dark and bright parts of the image. Works both in Desktop as well as VR.
• (Experimental) Ambient Occlusion: Screenspace Ambient Occlusion (SSAO) darkens creases, holes, intersections and surfaces that are close to each other. Does not work correctly with characters, which makes it useless.
• (Experimental) MotionBlur: Blurs fast moving objects. Works okay'ish in Desktop mode, but apparently this effect was not implemented to work in VR. Get your barf bag ready.
• (Experimental) Dithering: This is supposed to intentionally apply noise as to randomize quantization error. The idea is to prevent large-scale patterns such as color banding in images. However, in this implementation I barely see any difference between turning this on or off.

License