your post about ReLight is really interesting! I wanted to try it out but I understand nothing lol would you share some tips/tricks/little tutorial for dumbs like me on how to use it/setup for The Sims?
Hi anon!
It's not a massively involved shader, it's really simple, so a full tutorial would probably be a little over the top. Using it in TS4 is no different to using it in any other game.
The first thing I'd do is look at the preprocessor definition section at the bottom of the shader settings and change number of lights to 4 and hit enter. It'll reload and then you'll have 4 different lights to play with.
For the settings at the top, you want Use Smooth Normals turned on, and then all the boxes under Shadows ticked. For Shadow Mode you'll get the best quality with Trace All selected, and Ultra for Shadow Quality, but you can play around with these if your performance suffers (bear in mind I'm using a 980ti and hotsampling to larger resolutions and I'm fine with those settings).
Leave Shadow Sharpness at its default unless you want to go for a specific look, and you can keep Z Thickness at default too. You can play around with Z Thickness if shadows look like they're starting or ending in weird places. They're never going to be 100% accurate anyway, but you can sometimes coax them into not being truly awful.
One of the most important settings is down at the bottom: Visualize Light Position. Turn this on and it'll show you a round dot where your lights are positioned. This is really useful for lining them up exactly where you want them. Then, when you're done, you can turn them off (although they will disappear when you close the ReShade menu anyway, but this setting is useful for people like me who sometimes keep the ReShade menu open when taking screenshots so I can keep tweaking).
You'll see 4 sections that each start with a checkbox that says Active. Those are your 4 lights. Tick the ones you want to use. Then you can start moving them.
Next to Position there are 3 boxes, and they each represent respectively: left-right, up-down, backwards-forwards. Play around sliding each of them and see where your dot of light goes. You'll quickly get the hang of how to move the lights around using those position numbers.
Below that is Tint. It's easiest to click on the box of colour and colour pick than it is to manually change the RGB numbers. This controls the colour of your light.
Below that is Intensity. I think by default the lights are set up at the maximum level of 1.00 but that's super super bright, so bring that down considerably. You can use this to fine tune exactly how much illumination you want once you've set up the position.
And that's really it. You can use the lights to add more accurate light fall-off and shadows from in-game light sources like lamps, streetlights, windows, etc. You can also use it to just brighten a character's face a bit more for a clearer picture. Or you can really go to town and add completely fake and dramatic lights. It's up to you.
If you find that 4 lights isn't enough, you can't add more without editing the actual shader code. However, you can just duplicate the shader, so then you can have 8 lights, or 12, or 16, however many times you duplicate it.
To duplicate ReLight, create a copy of the shader in your shader folder, and give it a unique name (for example, qUINT_ReLight2.fx). Then, open it up in a text editor (I use Notepad++) and scroll all the way down to the bottom. You'll see a section that says
technique qUINT_ReLight
edit that so it matches the name you gave your copy, so in this case
technique qUINT_ReLight2
Then you can use them both alongside each other. I do start to experience a performance impact when using a second version, so bear that in mind.
I'm sure the better option would be to edit the shader code to add the ability for more lights directly in the first shader, but you'd need to be semi-knowledgeable about what to change. You're not often going to need more than 4 anyway, so it's overkill.
