If I could make a request regarding the post-process system, it would be the ability to set a certain level of sharpen on the current rendered image. Something similar in term of settings as the Vignette or the Chromatic Aberration. It’s something which is very popular now and can add a very nice touch if used correctly.
Software/Engines such as Marmoset toolbag support this and artists often liked it a lot.
I know this is possible by creating a custom post-process material, but I have myself never found a good way to do it (or under a limited performance cost) in UE3/UDK. Something native would in my humble opinion much better.
it was really easy to do this in UDK: take the scene texture, offset it, subtract it from the not-offset scene texture, and add the results to another scene texture node.
as for Rocket… I haven’t even figured out how to use postprocess materials yet.
but it’s good to know it might be implemented natively.
Unfortunately this method doesn’t give a very good result, it can be okay but not as good as true sharpen filter. Or getting a good result inside a material ask for too much nodes which result in a very costly shader. Doing this natively can be much more optimized.
means you want an edge sharpen, not just a global image sharpen. I guess for the devs it’s good to know the specifics
in any case, can’t the method I described above be mixed with sobel edge detection? AFAIK sobel edge detection isn’t an expensive shader and works fairly well for object edges.
but in any case, wouldn’t an edge sharpen shader do the exact opposite of what the postprocess AA shader does?
Thank you for your feature request. I have added a report to our feedback database. I am interested to see how this could be used for stylizing levels. If there is anything else that you would like to see in a future version of rocket, please let us know.
Sorry for digging this up, but here is an small example of what nice sharpen can do the scene (it is of course photoshoped ). I used smart sharpen.
The diffrence is probably exaggerated by the quality of screenshots, but it should give overall nice idea of how it can be used to add realizm and/or sylize image a bit.
I was able to implement it using the unsharp mask method. The 3x3 blur filter was just a scaled sum of samples near the texture coordinate, so that’s not particularly optimal, but it works at 1280x720 and 1920x1080.
A proper sharpening technique like shown in those images would indeed be nice. I often find myself using third party injectors such as SweetFX to sharper up the games I play. So many games are very soft, which can also depend on the kind of AA you are using. Sharperning really helps make a game look better while counteracting other post processes that tend to soften the image.
