Recreating the Dreamy Digicam Look in Unreal

[Music] digicams there's just something about the photos these cameras take dreamy film likee ethereal in this video I'm going to break apart what makes the digicam look and see if I can recreate it through postprocessing in the Unreal Engine so what's the difference between these cameras and modern cameras well on paper they're much worse there's a worse dynamic range the image is noisy there's no HD it's a lower resolution low FPS these limitations are mainly due to its sensor it's a CCD cam sensor oh I'm running out of battery whereas I have to do this great whereas modern cameras like this Fujifilm I'm filming on and smartphones use a SOS sensor seos SOS I need to clean this mirror so dirty CCD sensors work by capturing light on an array of pixels then streaming the electrons down a grid to be converted into a voltage and then read out as a digital value Simo sensors convert the electrons to voltages within each pixel so you don't have to spend time moving the electrons around so do the sensors create different images I went out and took some comparison shots between this digicam from 2009 and my iPhone 13 you can see what I mean with the dynamic range with the iPhone no detail is lost while the digicam is completely blown out in the light and is so much darker in the shadows and yet I actually prefer the digicam photos the hdr postprocessing on the iPhone makes everything look flat and less dramatic also the image is almost too sharp look at the leaves in this example they're just straight up look ugly whereas the digicam has a soft glow and the sky looks so much more bright while the post-processing on the iPhone makes a more consistent image it just feels more fake that being said these digicams have their own postprocessing built in too each brand has slightly different color settings I'd turn off hdr on the iPhone photos for like a better comparison but in the latest iPhones Apple doesn't allow you to turn off the HDR for some reason it's a lost art I've been looking at these old photos on Flickr to get a better idea of the different kinds of digicam petts that can happen and I think I'm ready to jump into unreal and try to actually recreate this look there's two main things we're going to be tweaking our main cine camera and this post-processing volume let's start by limiting the dynamic range of the camera in the color grading I've bumped up the contrast to 1.2 gamma to 1.2 and gain to 1.1 I've created this post-processing material that clamps down the high and low values to create that that washed out film look the sky is starting to look completely blown out which is what we're going for while we're here let's slow down the auto exposure a ton so that when we move from dark to light the camera has to take a second to adjust the exposure next I added some film-like color grading I added a little bit of orange to the Shadow and blues to the Highlight a ton of digicam examples I've seen look way colder too so I lowered the temp down to 4,500 chromatic aberation okay chromatic aberation gets a bad rap because artists tend to overdo it a bit a lot looking at some digicam photos it's clear that there is a chromatic apparation going on but it's on the edges and it's subtle you have to treat it like a spice just out a little bit you don't want to overpower the dish I'm using an intensity of 05 and an offset of. 3 that's all you need you can't even tell it's there but look at the difference when I toggle it for the noise we're going to be using the film grain settings however film grain and CCD noise have a slightly different texture I created a new texture that looks more like the colorful CCD noise and added that in with a pretty low intensity you probably can't even see it with the video compression here I'll Crank It Up Next was the field of view fov and this was a strg unreal it has these C cams that you can use to simulate real camera specs so I created one plugged in the sensor size and the focal length of 35 mm and why is everything so zoomed in there must be something I'm missing with this if anyone knows please tell me unreal's documentation is it's unhelpful it's not good okay it's not good I decided to just do some measurements in the real world to figure out what the fov should be okay so I came up with an experiment what I can do is I can measure the height of my guitar here and then see how far back I have to go so that the tip of the guitar is just at the top of the frame so kind of close here 109 CM 270 okay so I set up the same distances and unreal this Cube here is 109 cm tall and it is 270 M back and I have my cine cam on the ground here and we can see this is 35 and this is way too zoomed in if I zoom it out eventually we hit the top all the way at like 5.78 focal length so that's the number I'm going to go with that doesn't seem right there must be something I'm missing but these precise measurements worked out to an fov of around 55 de which feels right to me it's a little more zoomed in than a standard firstperson game but not super zoomed in speaking of zooming these digicams can zoom a lot of these cameras have a optical zoom as well as a digital Zoom to go even further in which sounds cool but it's literally just scaling the image up like he could see the pixels so I added this postprocessing effect that just scales the image up whenever you hit the zoom button it zooms in and out you can get some surprisingly nice depth of field shots with these cameras so I cranked the aperture all the way down to4 I added this little auto focus script as well to adjust the focal distance I shoot a line Trace out the front of the camera if it hits something we take that distance in meters if it doesn't hit anything then we just set it to the max distance of 1,000 m in the real world the auto Focus has to physically move to adjust so I added some math and luring on the Delta time to smoothly adjust the camera Focus to the Target Focus okay this is a little too good let's slow it down now it's accurately simulating how annoying it is to get the camera to autofocus digicams have a unique glitch effect whenever there's a bright light in the shot these purple lines appear but what are these well it's Bloom let me explain Bloom happens when the pixel on a sensor grid gets overwhelmed with the amount of light coming in its capacitor can't take in any more electrons so they start to spill out to the surrounding pixels remember how CCD sensors have to move the electrons around to get converted well that creates a weakness in the vertical Direction creating a vertical Bloom effect when the whole row gets overwhelmed it glitches out I always thought the directional Bloom was just an aesthetic of the 2000s for like typography or something I even used the effect all over my game kin burst I didn't realize that this effect is literally emulating how blooms in Old cameras looked so let's use the bloom in unreal to recreate this unreal by default uses a gajian based Bloom but we can change it to a convol bloom that uses is an image for reference there's some built-in ones you could try out this one makes everything look like the Matrix I created my own Bloom texture that has a bit of surrounding Bloom and a pale purple line running down the middle you can see the glitch now when I look at the sun this texture also creates that directional blooming that we were seeing all right now how well did digicams perform in the dark pretty bad I'm using the plug-in Ultra dnamic sky for this example which simulates different times a [Music] day I'm going to set the night brightness almost all the way down you'll need a source of light to actually see anything at night luckily there's a bit of moonlight that's casting a soft blue light over our scene wait how come photos of the Moon don't look blue in my reference photos though can did you cans not see the blue light of the Moon well it turns out Moonlight isn't blue when you look around at night what colors do you see for me there's this soft blue fuzz blanketing everything even outside at night if there's no artificial light I can see this blue fuzz in paintings and games and films night is often depicted this way with the moon casting this Eerie blue light over everything this matches what you see but when you take a picture the image appears way warmer it's not the camera that's miscalibrated it's our eyes our eyes have rods and cones that sense light the cones are used during the day and rods at low light however the rods are much more sensitive to lower wavelengths like blue and greens so at night Reds appear more dull and blues appear more vibrant this is called the pereni effect I first read about this in the book color and Light by James gurnie I should note that he argues that there's something else going on when it's completely dark only the rods should be active which are monochromatic but there's still that blue fuzz there's a theory that there's some spillover between the rods and blue cones that tricks the brain into perceiving a tinge of blue light Moonlight when measured is actually more orange than sunlight so when we take a photo of our cameras that's actually closer to reality than what we perceive but when we're making paintings and games and films are we trying to capture reality or our perception of reality well in this case I'm trying to emulate a camera so the Moon is orange okay well now we need something to deal with this Darkness so I added a flashlight this doesn't really feel like it's in the digi cam Spirit does it it just looks like a horror game digicams don't have a flashlight they have a flash light you can't see anything I really like how flash photography looks with digicams it makes everything look super ethereal and dramatic and is super flattering for some reason so I made the cone of my flashlight much larger and decreased the range then I added a flash button that simulates the flash of a camera with a slow falloff so it's not too stroby nice this is much less terrifying also those ghost orbs that you sometimes see at night with flash photography most of the time those are just out of focus pieces of dust sometimes they're actually ghosts if I add some dust particles I can recreate that too now with the flash it looks so good it looks so good okay final touches the camera shoots at a 4x3 aspect ratio which is the aspect ratio of this video so we're good there but it only shoots at 640x480 resolution at 29.97 FPS so let's lower everything down and then scale it back up so you can actually see it [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] and that's as far as I've gone what do you think it definitely still reads like CGI to me but some shots get really close to tricking you anyways thanks for watching oh and play kitten burst it's out now it's really good I promise and subscribe to follow along with my next project I just wish modern cameras could actually like have these filters built in you know like imagine if the iPhone all these filters are just like color palette changes but like what if we could recreate how like disposable cameras work or digicams or fil cams like I think that would be way cooler or at least let us turn off the HDR please why why can't we do that why can't we turn off the HDR

Channel: Jam2go

Views: 99,053

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Id: xsy27MCbJWM

Length: 14min 11sec (851 seconds)

Published: Sun May 19 2024