Night Vision

As I said earlier, one of the games I'm current playing is Call of Duty 4, which has probably one of the best Night Vision post-processing effect in all the games I've played (disregard this if you've played a game with a better effect, I haven't played every game that exists in the world, even though I'd like to), and I've decided to try and replicate it.

I have a very good start. Right now it acts correctly as night vision, but I have to tweak the luminosity so that during the day it's so bright you don't want to use them (that or simply have a on/off flag that disables night vision, but what's the fun in that?). However, at the moment, I'm tweaking the textures used for the effect. I'm by no means an artist, but I do know my way around Adobe Photoshop, I've been using it for around seven or more years now.

I will update this blog with some screen-shots once I get the effect to the point where it's worth sharing, or if I feel like showing the progress as I try to enhance the effect more and more. After I've finished with this effect, I'm moving on to Radial Blur. However, I think it'll be a little tricky, especially if I try to base it off of Call of Duty 4, which I might not because the effect isn't exactly what I'm looking for. The blur comes in when you toggle aim to aim down the iron sights, which will be the intent for my project as well, but what they did is fairly neat. They test the depth of the center of the screen (where you're aiming), if the object in front is close, there is no blur effect, and the opposite if the object is at a greater distance. It will also only blur objects that are close in view if the center position is at a greater distance. Therefore, if you're aiming at a far distance and there are no objects in your peripheral view there is no blur. If there is an object in your peripheral view, it will be blurred. A decent effect, but not what I'm looking for.

That being said, that type of an effect sounds excellent as a default effect (an effect that is always in use) since it mimics the human eyes decently well in my opinion. First, night vision, then radial blur that I want to use for aiming, then the peripheral view effect. Updates coming up.

Second Update:


Newest update to the night vision progress. I compared some of these results to that of real night vision photographs and videos. I've notice a major difference during that research. The military high tech night vision does have these small horizontal lines that go across the view, but they are not as drastic as Call of Duty 4 makes their version of night vision. I attempted to replicate the lines only by resizing the noise texture within the shader instead of constantly editing the texture again. I will do a better texture later or have an artist do so.


I had also noticed that there is a type of film grain within the military version of the night vision, I'm not sure if it was just dirt on the lens (since all of the videos and photographs I looked at were used during action) or that is how it is viewed. Therefore, I added a touch of that type of noise to the effect as well. Here are the results in multiple screen-shots:

Night Time, No Night Vision




Night Time, Night Vision




Day Time, No Night Vision




Day Time, Night Vision

And of course, it was the point to have it irritatingly bright while using night vision during the day, since that's how it would be. Call of Duty 4 doesn't do this, they just disable night vision all together, which is a good idea. No need to allow an effect if it's basically useless to the player. I tweaked the shader to produce the result anyways.

Update:


Here is my current results for the night vision post-processing effect. It isn't bad but still needs a lot of work, and the noise texture needs work as well. I was attempting to replicate the noise texture from Call of Duty 4 so I could have a better idea of what direction I should go. For the next edits I'm going to compare to real night vision photographs and use that as a reference. When being compared to Call of Duty 4, the coloring and so forth isn't correct yet. I seemed to have made myself overly obsessed with the noise texture to realize the colors (illumination) is way off, but I'll fix it.

Night Vision Off




Night Vision On