I understand that CircleDOF is super-fancy and has all the bells and whistles - and I appreciatte that, but CircleDOF can’t do blending or summation between different post-process volumes. Gaussian Blur can, quite easily. I don’t understand why this feature has been locked off to mobile renderers only. Pretty please, re-enable it for PC?
The relentless persuit of realism is starting to become a hindrance. I understand the need to move forward, and I understand that backwards compatibility is not always possible - but if a new feature is not at least up-to-par with an old feature, the old feature should not be completely deprecated until such time as it is. For example, Sequencer far exceeded Matinee’s capabilities - and Matinee wasn’t removed until Sequencer was production ready and had feature-parity with Matinee.
Something as complex as the renderer shouldn’t be any differnet IMO. It’s beyond the capabilities of most users to modify the renderer as it is - locking sections of it away on platforms where it has previously been available makes no sense.
I won’t get my hopes up… I’ve had a thread about the 4.14->4.15 tonemapper changes going on for over two years and it’s still not really possible to have saturated bloom. If CircleDOF can’t properly blend between volumes, then keeping Gaussian Blur around until it does would be idealio (Y)
Guassian is very good and simple to use and you havent replaced it with any better yet…
We need the gaussian toolset in ue4 and i would love if more blur techniques get implemented into ue4.
I do not necessarily need Gaussian DOF, but i strongly agree with the sentiment that removing working features is not a good idea (to put it mildly).
It took me while to get over tonemapper issue, now i am “enjoying” new and “improved” collections system where i need to click button to switch between collections and folders for no good reason. “No good reason” is what comes to my mind when i read or experience situations like this. I really hope Epic reconsiders their approach in handling existing features.
I don’t know about good reasons, but I can tell a bad reason:
Unreal developers have to build these tools using Slate UI…
And writing slate code + making it work on the editor is hard work.
It’s so much weird stuff so that, in there, even VisualAssistX code analysis tool often give up and stops working for “no good reason”.
Actually separate tab for collections in Content Browser is super convenient if you dock browser tab under viewport. This leaves your very little space for the folder list and it’s totally unusable if you’d enable Collections sections. I noticed that people working on levels use to dock Content Browser this way. I do it myself.
The change they did in 4.24 is awesome for this reason, it’s very convenient. Especially if your team decides to create hundreds of folders, directly in /Content. Or you have a lot of collections. The more content, the better this feature is
Sure, there are probably cases when this new system is more preferable, but not always. This is basically swapping one use scenario for another.
Perhaps option to put collections to new column would solve that. In the current form, it is too cumbersome to use if you constantly switching between folders and collections.
The post processing chain, including DOF, has been completely converted to our RDG framework that make GPU programming significantly simpler. For more information on the RDG framework, see the documentation and our crash course.
If you want to blur by post process volume(s), the recommendation is to use the depth blur that also in the end use DOF’s algorithm, but isn’t the lens blur model. You can use it to control a blurring radius and depth fade off. This one will also interpolate well between post process volumes!
That doesn’t really look like a solution to the problem - RDG is seriously advanced stuff, way above the capability of many users. I’m sure I could work it out but no doubt it’ll take a few days or weeks to get up to scratch with it. From a user standpoint, gaussian was a simple, useable method for just blurring the screen. I don’t feel like you should have to dive deep into rendering code to make that happen.
I’ve looked over the RDG presentation and I’m still none the wiser about how to recreate Gaussian DOF. It’s increasingly frustrating that Epic chases “physically accurate” rendering, at the cost of existing features. But tbh I’ve been moaning about this since 4.14. I guess it’s off to RDG…
I also could really do with it being enabled on PC again too. The new Depth of Field method has issues with jittering (even on MSAA/FXAA too). Cant blend it well, and just in general should not have been removed. Bring it back, makes no sense to just shut it off completely…
Is a tilt-shift effect possible with current DoF implementation?
With Gaussian DoF it was very easy to fake a tilt-shift effect, now I don’t see any way to do that.
The default 4.24 cinematic DoF works like that only when setting focus very close to the camera.
Overriding the Aperture (F-Stop) to values lower than 1.0 gets close, but it’s still not the same thing.
Just to point out another issue as well with Cinematic/Circle DOF, and I’ve said this many times, if you plan to allow your players to use resolution scaling (or if you use it by default which you likely have to do for base PS4 and XboxOne) Circle DOF does not function at all. All previous DOF effects worked with it, including the former CircleDOF algorithm.
Just want to say I migrated my project up to 4.24 last week only to now discover that the gaussian DOF has been removed. I have to completely rework what was a pretty significant (and perfectly functioning) part of my game. If it’s even possible - I can’t see how with the current options to blur near and far with a clear focal region.
