Questions about screenshotting

[TommyTomahawk]

I have some questions about the screenshotting option inside VAM in VR mode (never use desktop mode). Yesterday I had a session where I remember making a whole host of screenshots. Probably close to 50. When I closed VAM, the Saves/screenshots folder only had 25 or so screenshots in it. I very clearly remember specific shots I made that were missing (and yes, the camera "went off" as the flash appeared). So yeah, what could have happened here?

Second question is about that "flash" when you take a screenshot. Like, what is that even for? VAM isn't the real world and that flash doesn't do anything to your actual screenshot. What it DOES do is ruin your next screenshot if you take it too quickly.... you have to wait for the light to dissipate before you can take another pic. Why is this? It makes everything needlessly more difficult.

 

[MacGruber]

The flash is just an effect triggered after the shot, some find that helpful because it tells you the shot worked.

I recommend to use my SuperShot plugin. Besides making significantly better quality screenshots and having a larger preview window, it has an option to turn off the flash.

Plugins - MacGruber Essentials

Your most essential MacGruber tools in a convenient single VAR package. Note that you can download older versions of this plugin for free from here. AudioReverb Adds an Reverb filter effect to the audio source you place the plugin on. It's...

hub.virtamate.com

 

[VaMRainey]

I recommend to use my SuperShot plugin. Besides making significantly better quality screenshots and having a larger preview window, it has an option to turn off the flash.

Plugins - MacGruber Essentials

Your most essential MacGruber tools in a convenient single VAR package. Note that you can download older versions of this plugin for free from here. AudioReverb Adds an Reverb filter effect to the audio source you place the plugin on. It's...

hub.virtamate.com

I love Supershot (it's wonderful, I use it for all my photos!!), but I am curious, @MacGruber if you know why sometimes Supershot takes black/blank shots instead? My folder sometimes has duplicates that are solid black, or solid grey squares instead of the photo I wanted to take!

It can be frustrating, but a restart of VaM usually fixes it. Just curious

 

[MacGruber]

I love Supershot (it's wonderful, I use it for all my photos!!), but I am curious, @MacGruber if you know why sometimes Supershot takes black/blank shots instead? My folder sometimes has duplicates that are solid black, or solid grey squares instead of the photo I wanted to take!

It can be frustrating, but a restart of VaM usually fixes it. Just curious

Most likely your graphics card did run out of memory. Since SuperShot is essentially the stupid / brute force approach at rendering quality, it eats a MASSIVE amounts of memory. Usually around 3 GB, but up to 6GB graphics memory in the worst case, just for the screenshot. On top of that you also need memory for your VaM scene (textures, meshes, etc.), VaM itself, Windows and potentially other applications. Even some high-end cards, e.g. RTX3070 only have 8GB of memory. Don't bother with 2GB Laptop cards...

To help you the plugin does display an estimated amount of memory needed by the plugin. Temporarily needing more GPU memory than available is often not a problem, if the system can use your system memory (RAM) instead. Will be somewhat slow, but that doesn't matter for a screenshot. However, if you have trouble with black/grey or only partially rendered screenshots, you did run out of memory, though. Trying different combinations of resolution and/or resolution multiplier can help. The MSAA setting (in the plugin, not VaM) is basically a multiplier for memory usage...8x MSAA means 8x the memory, so you may want to try reducing that first. Also, if you want the plugin to downscale for you (default setting), it needs to hold the huge image and the half-sized image in memory at the same time, so it needs about 1/3 more memory than taking just saving the high-res shot directly and downscaling yourself.

 

[SlimerJSpud]

I had a real funny thing happen using Supershot. I was probably running low on memory due to switching scenes around. When it rendered the screenshot, all the characters were ghosts! An X-ray effect might be fun, but that's not what I wanted. After exiting Vam, and reloading the scene, screenshots were fine.

 

[VaMRainey]

Most likely your graphics card did run out of memory. Since SuperShot is essentially the stupid / brute force approach at rendering quality, it eats a MASSIVE amounts of memory. Usually around 3 GB, but up to 6GB graphics memory in the worst case, just for the screenshot. On top of that you also need memory for your VaM scene (textures, meshes, etc.), VaM itself, Windows and potentially other applications. Even some high-end cards, e.g. RTX3070 only have 8GB of memory. Don't bother with 2GB Laptop cards...

Thanks for the reply! I've had trouble with VAM crashing in the past so I typically take the photos at the lowest available level and that has worked for me in the past. I will still keep using it because I have yet to find something that's better than SuperShot <3

I actually ended up uninstalling ReShade because I preferred SuperShot to it!! Anyway, thanks for the tips. I'll double check all my settings when I'm doing my next photoshoot.

 

[SlimerJSpud]

There's a free program called GPU-Z that can monitor everything in the GPU better than anything native to Windows. What you can do is start GPU-Z before you launch VAM. Go to the Sensors tab. Launch VAM and do your usual thing. If VAM crashes, immediately go to GPU-Z and look at the history graph of Memory Used. Hover your cursor over the highest point on the graph, right before the drop when VAM crashed. That will tell the tale. I use GPU-Z when rendering in DAZ too. Great little tool!