Screenshot/renders for full armour sets

[joshhunt]

The 25th Jan TWAB included this really cool gif showing Guardians fitted out in the new IB ornaments.

Similarly, /r/DestinyFashion/ maintains a list of community-made screenshots of Guardians in the various armour sets.

It would be really nifty if this is something that API/definitions could provide - full renders of complete armour sets. I understand the difficulties or practicalities of this might be a bit of a challenge, but it would be really cool to have from Bungie. It's something I would jump on adding to destinysets.com

[ckhicks]

As the only person (to my knowledge) who built a screenshot/photomanipulation tool for D1, I am extremely interested in this as well. ;) Assembling the armor on a Guardian is easy but calling a set all together would be really neat!

[joshhunt]

Assembling the armor on a Guardian is easy

My Vanguard Tactician Gear collection begs to differ 😉

[vthornheart-bng]

Cool idea, I dig it! It is technically feasible, though at the moment I don't know how high up the priority chain it is. I like the idea though, so it's good to have it on our radar for the future.

[ckhicks]

@joshhunt Ha, I meant getting all the pieces currently equipped on a Guardian. I'm missing one or two for my dream set as well. :P

[joshhunt]

I know you're busy, but I saw this post on reddit today and it reminded me of how cool this feature from the definitions would be 😄

Absolute next level would be a way to fetch a render of specific character, with their shaders and everything, but I fully understand why that won't happen any time soon (or ever)

[ckhicks]

🤔If we could virtualize the render process through something other than WebGL...🧐

[ckhicks]

@vthornheart-bng I saw your comment on the Winter Wishlist: Screenshots for full armor sets (technically feasible to do now, but my fear is maintenance costs. Even our basic screenshots today are expensive and manual).

...and have so many questions. 😬My main one, however, is if there's any chance of getting insight
into how materials are calculated/rendered to get such an amazing look compared with most of our community attempts so far. Many have tried, but I have yet to see anyone achieve even what the Companion App is doing.

Are the screenshots like OP referenced taken from inside the game by Bungie folks, or is it truly possible to get results that look that good via WebGL or some other voodoo?

[justrealmilk]

There’s so much going on in-game and screenshots and icons are rendered in an in-game environment.

So we, or the companion app, could never hope to have full parity, but we can get close.

Lowlines does a great job at working through all the ingredients to get it working. But there’s a bunch of road blocks like shaders that need to be created manually.

Personally, I’d love to be able to render a full character. I don’t even know if we have access to the skeleton animation but that’d be great too

[vthornheart-bng]

So the long story is that we essentially have automation scripts that allow our screenshots to be sourced by the game itself. But they are currently:

1. Very brittle/can break with game UI changes
2. Require the game to actually be running, and on a system with sufficient specs to run the game in a timely manner
3. Require some level of manual oversight/review as the process runs, to make sure that these scripts and the game state haven't gotten out of sync

That's why sometimes we have released mismatched screenshots or other screenshot-related issues. It's a very brittle process that we don't have the time or resources to improve on at the moment, which is why I'm a bit fearful of adding another step to/variant of that process.

[ckhicks]

Gotcha. I figured the fidelity of those renders had to be from the actual game engine - I had thought about setting up a cloud machine with scripted UI controls to do something very similar. 😆

Like @justrealmilk mentioned, thing most of us have tripped on when rendering via WebGL are the materials themselves. While the Companion App does a beautiful job with environment lighting, reflections, etc., community attempts (aside from Lowlines) have been nowhere close. Decompiling the mobile app is a dead end (not that I would know, cough cough) so the shader math is the generally the blocker.

Not at all a huge priority but I'm super interested in pushing it further. 😄Thanks for hearing us out and providing little peeks into the way y'all handle things on your side!

[vthornheart-bng]

Aye, no problem! (and indeed, if you do that you'll basically be doing what we're doing! It works, but it's super brittle. Brittle enough that we don't even attempt to run it on an automated machine: I let it run on the background on my own development system so I can save some time if it falls off the rails. I'm filled with no small amount of shame about that!)

Unfortunately there's a lot of work that'd need to happen in order to get the various shaders to be exported safely to mobile-renderable formats: it's a complicated situation, but right now we don't predict we're going to get that information anytime soon. :(

[justrealmilk]

@ckhicks keep in mind, there's shaders gone wrong even in the companion app. I presume @hellocontrol-bng works on that and he has access to internal stuff haha.

We should just feel lucky that any of this is possible at all as 3rd parties.

Great GDC talk from D1 days https://youtu.be/zp4NZ8i80QI?t=1427 explaining icon generation. By the sounds of it, it hasn't changed drastically, at least for item screenshots.

Maybe in the future, we might see set screenshots, but to do them though, someone would have to return to old work and manually monitor the process