Tutorial Unity HS2 & AIS - Transparent background pngs and high resolution screenshots using Screenshot Manager

[maxtol]

A lot of noobs (like myself) have asked about how to do this, so here's what I found with my installed games and plugins:

I have a distinctly average PC. I generally play in a window of 1600x900px, and my monitor maxes out at 1920x1080px, but I can now take screenshots at up to 10000 x 5625px -that's 56 megapixels. In addition the screenshots from Studio Neo 2 and Character Creation now have the option of a transparent background.

If like me you have a fairly recent repack of Honey Select 2 or AI Shoujo, transparent pngs and high resolution caps can be made using Screenshot Manager - a BepinEx plugin which modifies the standard F11 Screencap function. I think credits are due to to Essu, ManlyMarco and DeathWeasel1337 on GitHub.

I had Screenshot Manager v16 already installed in HS2, and v15.1.2 in AIS. Being a bit slow though, it took me about 2 weeks to stumble across it.

To find out if you have Screenshot Manager or to edit it's settings: press F1 in Game, Character Creation or Studio to access your 'plugin settings'. Scroll down and hopefully Screenshot Manager is there. If so, open it up.

Stick a tick in the 'Alpha' box and you can now take screenshots in Character Creation or Studio Neo with clear backgrounds to layer up with other images in your favourite graphics program. Alpha screenshots only work when you have a flat background, or with the background set to 'None'. Any other backgrounds and in-game scenes are rendered normally and opaque. Translucent clothing or wings etc will be rendered opaque in screenshots.

If you zoom in close to a saved transparent background png taken at normal monitor resolutions (like 1920x1080) you'll find the pixels round the edges of characters are jaggy with some background-colour pixels still showing. However, this can be overcome by taking screenshots at higher resolutions as follows:

Further down the Screenshot Manager settings screen you'll see 'screenshot height' and 'screenshot width'. Both dimensions go up to 10000 pixels, and it's tempting to just kick the numbers up as far as they will go -in proportion to your game setting or monitor screen of course. But unless you have a box stuffed with RAM be careful. I maxed the numbers out and had repeated crashes on pressing F11. How high you can go depends on the specs of your machine and you don't want to be waiting too long for a render, so best to go up slowly and test each setting.

I noticed that upscaling was set to 2 by default, so (assuming upscaling entailed additional processing) I set that to 1 and set screen shot size to 4x my screen size. That worked fine. In the end I found that 10000 x 5625px is OK on my machine without the upscaling. It does take a few seconds to snap-and-save an 11-90MB png (depends on image), but I can live with that. The detail is amazing, and the edges of charas in transparent shots from studio are plenty smooth enough for most purposes.

Some effects won't show up in screenshots so you'll need to experiment. In game and Studio I leave bloom, vignette, fog etc switched on, but DOF was generally not rendered accurately in screenshots anyway so I usually keep it switched off.

I believe there is an update to Screenshot Manager which allows screenshots to about 15k px each way. I haven't tried it though , as 10k max is enough for me.

Besides, if it ain't broke...


edit: images added 11.26.20: (click thumbnails to view pics)

The first two are extreme close-ups of small parts of Alpha screenshots made in Screenshot Manager 15.1.2. Both screenshots were of the same view in Studio Neo 2. They were dropped onto a flat green background to show the transparency and then cropped.

Both images here show actual pixels but at 4x linear zoom with no resampling so that each original pixel is now a square of 16 pixels of the same colour. It makes things easier to see!

The first screenshot used the default settings - 1080 pixels high with a render rate of 2 :

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It's not bad considering this image is 4 times the size it would normally be viewed at. As I understand it, the 'render rate' in Screenshot Manager is actually a render upscaling factor. So the default 2 means that the screenshot is rendered at double the screen size, and then resampled back down. This helps to avoid aliasing (jaggies) and keeps finer detail.

Next is a screenshot made at the highest resolution I can make with Screenshot Manager - 10000 x 5625, with a render rate of 1:

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For comparison, I reduced the resolution of this screenshot to 1080 pixels high in Photoshop, and then cropped to the same area as the first.

Hopefully you can see the difference in quality, especially in the hair texture and where the face meets the background. It's not a massive improvement, especially considering the much higher file size of a 10k wide screenshot, but it could be useful when you want lots of detail or really clean transparent edges.

A normal (non-Alpha) high res screenshot from Studio Neo 2:

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Again, click the thumnail to see this image. It was reduced to only 640px high for posting and jpegged, but the face inset is pretty much original pixels from the 10k wide screenshot.

If the original screenshot was viewed at 100% (at the screenshot default of 72dpi) it would be over 11 feet wide (3.5m)!

 

[SeniGaming]

when you make the images of size 10000 how much do they weigh?

 

[maxtol]

when you make the images of size 10000 how much do they weigh?

Yes... sorry, -I realised the text in my post could be simpler!

"....I found that 10000 x 5625px is ... a 90MB png..."

 

[SeniGaming]

My game weighs 2giga and all my screens are in 1280x720 and they weigh between 400 and 800 ko...

If they were 90Mb then my game would already weigh more than 150Giga...

Do you have a solution for that or do you want to make a game with 100 scenes?

 

[maxtol]

My game weighs 2giga and all my screens are in 1280x720 and they weigh between 400 and 800 ko...

If they were 90Mb then my game would already weigh more than 150Giga...

Do you have a solution for that or do you want to make a game with 100 scenes?

Scenes or screens? I was talking about 2D still image screenshots (=screen captures).

The game folder itself doesn't get bigger because I don't leave them in the UserData/cap folder. They can be stored anywhere.

I take them out, layer them together in Photoshop with other images, and I can resize them to make them smaller.

90MB screen caps will be much too big for most people. Screen capture at very high resolution is just an option. It is not just a physically bigger picture -it is much more detail in textures, backgrounds etc, and smoother outlines in Alpha shots.

It means that your final edited images can be better quality, even if they end up back at 1270 x 720 pixels after editing. You have to try it to see the difference!

 

[maxtol]

Also: pngs are quite big files for screencap image storage.

if you convert a png to a jpg with a medium-high quality setting you won't see much difference, but the file size reduces to about 1/6 of the png.

So a 75MB png which I just took from the game at 10000px wide becomes a 13MB jpg, but it is still 10000px wide.

But remember that jpgs can not have an Alpha channel (for transparency). And pngs are generally better for images with a lot of flat color, which jpegs degrade, sometimes resulting in a bigger file than the original png.

 

[SeniGaming]

Scenes or screens? I was talking about 2D still image screenshots (=screen captures).

The game folder itself doesn't get bigger because I don't leave them in the UserData/cap folder. They can be stored anywhere.

I take them out, layer them together in Photoshop with other images, and I can resize them to make them smaller.

90MB screen caps will be much too big for most people. Screen capture at very high resolution is just an option. It is not just a physically bigger picture -it is much more detail in textures, backgrounds etc, and smoother outlines in Alpha shots.

It means that your final edited images can be better quality, even if they end up back at 1270 x 720 pixels after editing. You have to try it to see the difference!

Yeah I'm going to try it. ty

 

[maxtol]

My game weighs 2giga and all my screens are in 1280x720 and they weigh between 400 and 800 ko...

If they were 90Mb then my game would already weigh more than 150Giga...

Do you have a solution for that or do you want to make a game with 100 scenes?

My apologies - I just realised you are a dev and when you say 'your game' you don't mean your Illusion game, you mean YOUR game!

I was probably telling you things you already know.