Mega Bezel Reflection Shader! - Feedback and Updates

[antonvd]

Hi @HyperspaceMadness! I have been a huge fan of the Megabezel reflection shader for a while now, so, before my challenge / question: thank you very much for your hard work and dedication on this!

So I’ve been watching content that RetroCrisis puts up on YouTube (it’s how I found out about MegaBezel in the first place), and he recently featured a shader preset pack by Cyberlab: The Cybertron Death To Pixels shader pack. I am a huge fan of how clearly it presents the individual RGB beams and how great it looks on my HDR TV. I think it’s the best CRT shader I’ve ever seen.

The only thing holding it back from being my go-to preset for 16 bit emulation though is the lack of the bezels and reflections that I’ve grown accustomed to from your shader packs.

I did manage to get Megabezel working alongside the HDR Cybertron preset by using the “Prepend shader” under Shader options in Retroarch. However, this seems to have an effect on the size clarity of the RGB beams’ resolution - it makes the phosphors look blurred out compared to when running without Megabezel.

I assume this is because the Cybertron shaders are loading in addition to CRT shaders present in your Megabezel presets, causing an excessive blurring/dithering/etc.

So - I’m wondering whether there’s a way to decouple just the bezels and reflections, and use just those in conjunction with other shaders?

I hope my question makes sense, and thanks in advance if you can help at all

[Duimon]

@antonvd

the HDR Cybertron

First of all… let’s agree to call this a MegaTron shader preset. @MajorPainTheCactus is resposible for the shader, and “Cybertron” is just custom parameters.

The reason this clarification is important is to avoid confusion, and to support the realization that there are MegaTron presets in the MegaBezel.

If you load one of the Mega Bezel Megatron presets and save it.

(I would recommend \shaders_slang\bezel\Mega_Bezel\Presets\Base_CRT_Presets\MBZ__1__ADV__MEGATRON.slangp.)

You can convert one of the Cybertron presets to a PARAMS file by following my guide.

Params_02_Community_Derived_Params.md

Then add a second reference in the saved preset, pointing to your params file.

Before saving the Mega Bezel preset, you will need to enable HDR mode in the shader parameters. You may also want to disable curvature and integer scale, and set “Non-integer scale %” to 100.00.

This will give you just the side portions of the bezel and reflections while giving similar results to the Cybertron presets.

You can play with the curvature (A small amount may still work well.) and Non-integer Scale %.

The point is that, because of @HyperspaceMadness’ hard work, it is mostly possible to do what you ask without “decoupling” anything.

I say “mostly” only because I am not sure how much @MajorPainTheCactus has updated his shader since it was integrated into the Mega Bezel.

[blattacker]

@soqueroeu

By the way, what a beautiful shelf in the image!!

Thank you! It should be even better in future updates, there have been a few really important changes made to the scene as a whole (that have also, unfortunately, made it take longer to render

@Drybonz

Also… West Side Story right next to Men in Black indicates this person has some very diverse cinematic interests.

That would be my dad for you ahaha! All the movies and CDs in the scene are based on (and scans of, in a lot of cases) the actual movies and music my parents had growing up.

@Drybonz

I’m surprised no one has asked if we will be able to customize the movie collection yet.

I have legitimately wondered if that would be possible. Right now, the way the project is set up, absolutely not, it would involve completely rerendering the scene with the new files, and the renders are taking upwards of 40 hours each at this point, but who knows what the future holds?

[Duimon]

@blattacker

I have legitimately wondered if that would be possible.

You could render the spines in a 50% gray, and composite spine art on them in post. Then use an additional image layer with additive blending to apply them in the shader.

The additive blending mode will preserve the rendered shadows and lighting.

[Drybonz]

I see I have started something here…

[HyperspaceMadness]

Some more experiments and some videos

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MegaBezel_RoomBounce_WhiteMaterial_SF2_2023-10-28.mp4

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Mega Bezel Room Bounce Textured

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And this is what the base texture looks like before lighting and shadows applied

[blattacker]

That’s looking so sick!

Work got crazy for a few days again, but I’m hoping to have updated and expanded renders out soon, here’s a taste for everyone with a new (and in my opinion, greatly improved) model for the television, as well as expanded media to fill the entertainment center out some more.

[Boz1978]

Awesome progress! @HyperspaceMadness

[c9f5fdda06]

MegaBezel_RoomBounce_WhiteMaterial_SF2_2023-10-28.mp4

That’s looks so sick

thank you 🫡

[Drybonz]

Awesome… I’ve been looking forward to seeing the video in action. It looks really cool. I’m sure this is in the early stages, but, if anything, maybe the strong room lighting looks a little too intense or opaque. I’m kind of imagining what it will look like with my personal setup and it’s exciting to think of the realism it will add. Going to be really cool.

[HyperspaceMadness]

Yeah I agree with you, getting the balance of ambient + diffuse + bounce light & which shadows are applied to which light source is one of the challenges which I’ll have to address before this can feel more right. @blattacker and I are working together to try some different lightings in 3d to see what works best.

The other thing I need to do is to allow more reflection outside the bezel for things like arcade cabinets, although this will probably be more straightforward than the 3d lighting to implement/use

[soqueroeu]

It’s looking superb. I really hope this isn’t a performance issue. But it can be a great ally to avoid Burnin on some modern TVs, when used with a static background.

[Nightsax]

Hello, can someone tell me how to make this Bezel work on Nvidia Shield (pro 2019, firmware 9.1.1)? I know that Shield’s hardware is pretty weak, I’ve read here that only Potato preset might work. But I’ve tried MBZ_5_POTATO and MBZ_5_POTATO_GDV_DREZ-480p and both give crashes. Will this Bezel ever work on Nvidia Shield ? It would really like to see a working preset, even with a lighter performance. (right now I am using xbr/4xbr-hybrid-crt which is decent, but it doesn’t come close in terms of quality). Here is a log file after RA crash.

[HyperspaceMadness]

Since it will still be a while before the big update with the room lighting, and the update will be a big one which will change a lot of things, I’ve decided to do a branch update on top of the last release soon with updates from Guest and Dogway’s new Grade

Some snapshots of the new updated integrated:

An NTSC Snapshot

New Grade with it’s new default color temperature of 8500

How do people feel about this as a default color temperature?

[far327]

Color temp looks good. I would be happy with those and not change much if anything. Getting spidey’s red just right is always a good reference point for me.

[Duimon]

@HyperspaceMadness

Guest and Dogway’s new Grade

Nice!

@HyperspaceMadness

How do people feel about this as a default color temperature?

I like it. Things are a tad bit cool now.

[kokoko3k]

I second Duimon, maybe 8.5k is a bit too much.

[Wally]

Maybe naive question: While we wait for the new version, can we somehow update the underlying shaders (guest’s one) and if so, how?

Thank you

[Cyber]

@HyperspaceMadness

How do people feel about this as a default color temperature?

I think I remember missing the jet black default black levels and increased contrast that they brought as an OLED TV user so I ended up reducing the Black level as a result.

I also think I had to manually tweak the colour temperature in order to get things to where I felt they looked right.

I did appreciate the new Sega colour palette though. All in all it was a mixed bag of feelings updating to the new grade.

@Dogway did include a way to get neutral colours though it’s all in his thread.

My other concern with the raised black level was that it would somehow clash with @guest.r’s new at the time, inactive mask setting, which also had the effect of slightly lifting the Black levels.

In general, I had liked where things were colour wise out of the box with the old Grade a bit more than with the new Grade.

[HyperspaceMadness]

@kokoko3k

I second Duimon, maybe 8.5k is a bit too much.

Yeah, I think maybe around 7.2k or 7.5k might be a better default. I found setting it at 6.5k really still seemed to have the yellow cast.

The color temperature really shows up in the effect on blue and purple, shifting them more blue.

@Cyber

@Dogway did include a way to get neutral colours though it’s all in his thread.

I’ll check this out to see what the different defaults could be

@Cyber

My other concern with the raised black level was that it would somehow clash with @guest.r’s new at the time, inactive mask setting, which also had the effect of slightly lifting the Black levels.

We’ll have to test this out to see, I think if you don’t adjust the black level in grade it should not have any interaction with @guest.r’s shader.

@guest.r is there anything special about the version of grade you have included with guest advanced?