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| Name of gadget | Grade & Effects |
| Section | Cameras & Lighting |
| Number of Tweak pages | 5 |
| Author | LadylexUK, QuietlyWrong |
| Last updated | 07 June 2019 [EA v1.03] |
Description
The Grade & Effects gadget is a powerful tool for putting a final touch on the visuals in your Dream, and its effects can range from the subtle to the dramatic, from reducing the saturation on a “memory” cut-scene to making your Scene look like it’s playing on poor-quality VHS on a TV in the 1980s.
This gadget has a real variety of effects but all are essentially “post-processing” effects, i.e. Dreams applies them after all the other lighting calculations and screen-affecting gadgets have done their work, and they have to apply to the whole screen.
All of the effects take place in real time on your screen when you tweak a powered gadget, so the best way to find out what each does is to experiment! Some of the effects are more obvious when there are lights or strong colour variations in a scene.
Many of the effects are very striking and can be used most effectively in very short blasts. By using the action recorder, for example, you could record the screen “pincushioning” outwards and then back to normal in a split second – then use this animation to add emphasis to momentous events in a Scene, such as collecting power-ups.
Example Tutorial (adapted from Media Molecule)
- Stamp a Grade & Effects gadget into your Scene.
- On the Screen Effects page, increase the “Grain” slider to see the effect of adding a “Film Grain” to the screen.
- Try adjusting the “Pincushion” tweak and see the difference between dragging the slider left or right of centre.
- Switch to the Pixellation & Glitch Effects tab.
- Try increasing the slider for “Scan Lines” to create the effect of a low-resolution screen.
- Drag the handle on the “Resolution” tweaks (at the top of the Pixellation Effects) to see the effect on the apparent pixel size.
- Drag the handle of the “Glitch” tweak and watch the effect on the screen – this one’s animated so you should give it a few seconds. At this point, you should have a pretty dodgy display! Try lots of other things!
Tweak Menus
Click on arrows to reveal
Tweak Menu 1: Light & Colour
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- Menu page indicator
- Brightness
Alter the overall brightness of the screen. You might use this in a “Player Options” setting so the player can set the screen brightness to a comfortable level. - Contrast
Alter the overall contrast of the screen. This is the degree of difference between darker and lighter areas of the screen. At low values, everything can look more dull and grey, whereas higher values enhance the difference to the point that everything is either light or shadow. - Saturation
Alter the overall saturation of the screen. This is the strength of the colours – you could for example reduce this value when the player gets close to death to cause the colours to drain from the screen. - Hue Cycle
Use this gadget to “rotate” the colours being output on the screen. All colours get shifted, so for example if red becomes yellow, yellow might become green, while green goes to indigo and blue to red. This can create some surreal, hallucinatory effects. - Power
This is where you turn the gadget on/off.
Tweak Menu 2: Colour Tinting
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- Menu page indicator
- Shadows
These three colour gadgets allow you to apply a specific colour tint to the screen. So you might, for example, redden the screen in the vicinity of a volcanic magma stream – if that suits your image. The provision of three separate colour tweaks gives you greater versatility because these can be set to different values, so that dark areas (Shadows) are tinted with one shade, while light areas (Highlights) are tinted with another and everything in between (Mid-Tones) is tinted with a third colour. By picking vivid, very-different colours, you can lend a surreal or dream-like tone to your scenes. - Mid-Tones
See Shadows, above. - Highlights
See Shadows, above. - Power
This is where you turn the gadget on/off.
Tweak Menu 3: Screen Effects & Special Effects
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- Menu page indicator
- Vignette Colour
Relevant in combination with a non-zero Vignette Strength, this colour picker can be used to specify the outside colour that bleeds into the edges of the screen. - Vignette Strength
The vignette simulates a photographic effect whereby the image fades out at the edges of the screen, particularly in the corners, rounding the image somewhat. It can help draw the eye to the middle of the screen or give a sense of enclosure. Choose the strength with this slider and pick a colour from the tweak above. Try animating it – perhaps in time with music or a heartbeat – for a really striking effect! - Bloom
This effect simulates a photographic effect whereby very bright regions of an image can bleed into adjoining areas. It heightens the impression of brightness and contrast. Use this tweak to choose the degree of bloom that looks best for your Scene or animate it to help enhance the sense of the scene brightness changing, for example. - Lens Flare
This effect simulates a photographic effect whereby very bright spots of light are reflected within the camera and create effects such as lines of repeated light spots or haloes and a general scattering of light across the image. Because the effect occurs as a natural (and originally undesirable) result of real-world camera optics, computer generated imagery often replicates these effects to add to realism. Use this slider to adjust the amount of lens flare on screen. - Grain
This effect adds visual “noise” to the screen to simulate the effect of film grain. Increase the slider to make the grain more prominent. - Sharpen / Blur
Use this slider to add a filter to the screen that will either sharpen (negative values) or blur (positive values) the image to either emphasise or soften the more detailed parts of the image. - Motion Blur
Use this slider to increase or decrease the amount of blurring associated with motion on screen. In the real world, cameras capture an image over a short period of time (usually milliseconds) which means that any fast motion causes the moving object to smear out or blur in the resulting image. This tweak replicates that phenomenon. Huge motion blur can create some hallucinatory effects! - Camera Movement Blur
Use this slider to increase or decrease the amount of blurring associated with the movement of the camera itself. - Pincushion
Use this slider to cause the whole screen to bulge inwards (negative values) or outwards (positive values) to imitate unusual camera lenses. The outward pincushion effect is commonly used to suggest that the image is being projected on to a curved, convex surface, as this evokes the era of viewing everything on CRT television sets rather than the flat screens that prevail today. - Power
This is where you turn the gadget on/off.
Tweak Menu 4: Hue Selectivity
[menu as of EA v1.03 – the recolouration of the power input is a bug to be fixed!] |
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- Menu page indicator
- Hue Selectivity
Use this tweak to add some hue selectivity to the screen. This is an effect whereby one colour takes prominence over others, and all others are desaturated until (at highest settings) they become shades of grey. It can be used to draw particular attention to elements in your scene with certain colours, or to lend a weird, otherworldly tone to the screen. - Hue Affected
With Hue Selectivity active, use this slider to pick the hue that you want to be “selected” or stand out from the others. - Power
This is where you turn the gadget on/off.
Tweak Menu 5: Pixellation & Glitch Effects
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- Menu page indicator
- X Resolution
The X Resolution and Y Resolution tweaks can be modified together by grabbing and moving the shared handle in the box between them. Moving the handle rightwards and upwards increases the size of the apparent “pixels” that make up the screen, horizontally and vertically. - Y Resolution
See X Resolution, above. - Scan Lines
Increasing Scan Lines imposes many horizontal black lines across the screen – the higher the setting, the more obvious the effect. This calls into mind a close-up view of an old CRT television which would literally draw the image in horizontal lines across the screen, so stands in for a “retro”, low-resolution aesthetic. - Posterise
Increasing this effect reduces the number of unique colours available on screen – a special effect that reminds me of too many 80’s pop videos. At its highest setting, the overall effect if very pronounced, reducing an image to just a handful of vivid colours. - Chromatic Aberration
Here you can choose the intensity of Chromatic Aberration on screen. In real-world optics, refractive lenses don’t focus all colours equally, so images (especially those taken with relatively simple or cheap lenses) tend to have coloured fringes that are more pronounced towards the edge of images and where there is strong contrast between light and dark. This is chromatic aberration, and you can simulate it with this tweak. - Glitch X
The Glitch X and Glitch Y tweaks can be modified together by grabbing and moving the shared handle in the box between them. The result is a glitchy image that simulates both radio interference on an analogue TV signal and glitching and tracking flaws of old VHS tapes. Play with the settings and watch how the screen behaves over a few seconds, because this is an animated effect. - Glitch Y
See Glitch X, above. - Power
This is where you turn the gadget on/off.
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