Today I worked on our trailer for our game CoBots. Besides the videographical changes from the GGC trailer I made earlier this year there was also this lingering problem with the colors and the extreme color banding that occured throughout the video. The characters (and everything in general) was also very washed out and somewhat blurred, and this time I set out to do it right. For those of you who don’t know what color banding is, this image should showcase it:

source: wikipedia.org

Basically it’s the weird gradient that shows up everywhere. In addition to this, the previous video (GGC trailer) also seemed to have a greenish tint to it. After some research I managed to conclude what caused this.

Unity settings

Our game is made in Unity, but these settings are general settings that may or may not be present in your game or engine.

Besides the fact that the game natively looks somewhat like the video represents (in terms of color banding), a huge difference is also made if you switch on HDR on the main camera. I fail to forget why we didn’t have HDR from the beginning but I recollect something about not figuring out the Tonemapping or making it look good enough. Anyway we switch on HDR and the differnce is quite significant in some places. For those of you who don’t know HDR basically more naturally reflects the way we percieve colors and light, and it’s often coupled with a technique called Tonemapping which re-evaluates the HDR values down to a scale which is representable on a standard monitor, which has several more constraints than what our eyes can see. However in our project we didn’t opt for final tonemapping because the overhaul of recreating the lighting and materials is way beyond what we have time for at the moment. As such I enabled HDR but set the settings to reflect non HDR (in terms of bloom and tonemapping), while still keeping the benefits of better color banding.

Notice the difference on the wall near the base of the receptor; with HDR on the banding is less extreme and the colors are also more consisitent. An even bigger example is this:

The wall and floor has a much better gradient with HDR on and with HDR off there also seems to be a lot of weird color wave patterns.

Fraps settings

Fraps is a great video recorder and excellent for getting raw footage before editing in a perfectly clear and accurate quality. However there is a certain optimization feature which may not be useful for just any-day gameplay footage. That is the option Lossless RGB Capture. For a regular user who is just going to post a gameplay video on YouTube then this option is mostly unheard of, however for doing high-quality rendered video used commercially (such as the new trailer) then it’s vital. What it basically does is that when it’s off (as by default) Fraps optimizes the capture process on the fly, rendering video which slightly differs from in-game but at a lesser performance cost. Using lossless capture (a checkbox under Movies called Force lossless RGB capture) Fraps more or less captures exactly what is seen, at a greater performance cost. Note the difference below:

Note the painful color banding on the wall with lossy capture. With lossless the capture is much more accurate as to how it looks in-game.

That’s what I had to say about capturing in-game HD footage and what you might need to think about when using Untiy and Fraps. Of-course the HDR setting is much more a design decision and more gameplay-impacting than just a setting for recording HD footage and the decision should be made relatively early as there is a huge overhead related to redoing lighting setups and materials for a consistent look.

About Kenth Ljung

2012 Programming

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