Earlier this year NVIDIA announced they would be bringing their in-game photography tech, Ansel, to a whole range of games as the year rolled out. It’s incredibly cool, and you can take some remarkably gorgeous shots with it.
Alternatively, you can be a massive dickhead like me and check out everyone’s dental work.
For anyone with a GeForce GTX 600 series graphics card and higher, you can start using Ansel right now. You’ll need the latest version of GeForce Experience to get it going, and it doesn’t hurt if you update your drivers as well.
The idea is pretty simple: whenever you want, you can push a shortcut (ALT+F2 in this instance) to bring up an overlay that lets you capture the in-game surroundings how you want. This is what it looks like:
Once Ansel’s fired up, you’ve got full control over the camera. You can take a shot from the perspective of another character, be a fly on the wall, check out the buildings and characters in the distance that you’d ordinarily never see.
Or, if you’re like me, you can see what the inside of a video game character’s mouth looks like.
The idea of being able to roam around and capture images of all the things you normally wouldn’t see is, well, pretty fun. But that’s probably because I have the maturity of a 12-year-old.
If you prefer to actually use Ansel for the powerful in-game tool that it is, you can take some remarkable shots. As Luke mentioned before, you can mess with the colour, brightness, contrast, field of view (beyond what the game normally allows), vignetting, as well as a whole range of filters.
Mirror’s Edge doesn’t have the option to capture photos at extreme resolutions like Witcher 3 or The Witness, but you can still take some pretty snaps. Here’s some examples of me not being a dickhead:
You can also take panoramas or 360 degree photos with Ansel, although viewing them can be a bit challenging. The file sizes can be massive as well, which can a bit problematic if you just want to share something with friends.
Fortunately, Facebook supports 360 photos and video now. Here’s a couple of shots from the opening level. The second’s kinda neat — it’s all the stuff outside the building where Faith is, so it’s full of stuff you’d normally never see. You’ll have to click through to Facebook to get the 360 functionality to work (sorry), but once you’re there just hold down left-click or drag the photo around to see everything.
Pretty cool. If you’ve got Mirror’s Edge Catalyst, The Witness or The Witcher 3, a supported NVIDIA card and an updated version of GeForce Experience, you should be able to take pictures of everyone’s teeth now.
Comments
9 responses to “NVIDIA’s Ansel Is Great Fun If You’re A Dickhead”
Ansel is great, I toyed around with it a bit during the beta. Can’t wait for more games to support it.
I had a crack at this last weekend.
What programs work well with 360 photos?
I actually prefer ‘flying’ in Ansel with a controller. I couldn’t snap many hi-hi-hi res photos because of HD space, and to take the hands off the controller to perform the keystroke resulted in many creatures getting the drop on me in Witcher 3.
‘Here’s me looking like a badarse’
‘Goes to press Alt+F2’
‘SLASHY SLASHY’ or in some cases ‘CHOMPY CHOMPY’
‘Back to controller’
‘Here’s me looking like a corpse’
The turning speed and moving the camera up and down is really, really slow, and there’s no way to speed it up too. Be nice if the NVIDIA gallery had a high-speed screenshot option as well for stuff like that.
Re. programs with 360 photos: best one I found so far was a free trial of Video 360 from the Microsoft Store. Worked a charm.
Thanks muchly.
Please to be making some sort of ‘send us in your best Ansel efforts’ article?
Wait scratch that. People might confuse it with Ansell.
Ew.
Finally an article for dickheads!
JIMUUUUU
Dippaaaaaaaa
Classic Jimu! Don’t ever change! 😉
I will remain a complete & utter dickhead
Why is it that someone has to be a dickhead to enjoy technology that was never available outside of developers before?
Or.. you could upload it to http://360.vizor.io/ and, share a direct link to the image and/or embed it on your page. I see a ton of people on reddit using it to post 360 game screenshots. They seem to enjoy it.