Reshade 5 + Virtamate (VAM) Guide & Presets (Pixiv Fanbox)

This guide is free to everyone, however, the PDF version of this guide and my Presets are exclusive to Silver tier fans and up. The PDF and Presets can be found in the VAM Addons folder for download.

PREREQUISITES

Download MacGruber PostMagic

PostMagic is a plugin that can add various effects to your scene. LUTs, Bloom, DoF, Anti-aliasing, etc. This plugin also serves another purpose for ReShade. PostMagic’s DoF setting allows ReShade the ability to read the depth of a scene for any shader effects that require it. Download this plugin either through your in-game browser or directly from the Hub and drop it into your AddonPackages folder.

Download ReShade 5.x

Download the standard ReShade. ReShade with add-on support has not been tested so use that version at your own risk. ReShade 5.x differs from ReShade 4.x and earlier releases as it uses dxgi.dll, whereas d3d11.dll was used previously. Dxgi.dll may cause issues with Virt-A-Mate installations on encrypted drives. If you run into issues you may need to install a 4.x version of ReShade instead. You can find my old guide for ReShade 4.x here.

Download Skared’s Preset Pack (Silver Tier and up only)

These are 3 of my own personal presets to get you started. I personally use Preset 3 on all my scenes as I find it to be the perfect mixture of contrast, color, and brightness. I suggest you play around with all shaders available, learn what each shader does, and develop your own favorite style.

POSTMAGIC SETUP

Adding to your session defaults

I highly recommend adding PostMagic to your session defaults. A session default is a defined set of plugins that will load and automatically run every time you start Virt-A-Mate. Having PostMagic start automatically will guarantee that ReShade’s depth buffer will always be able to read the scene.

The caveat to this setup is that it may cause issues when loading scenes that have PostMagic placed within them. Some creators use the PostMagic plugin directly inside their scenes to create various effects such as bloom or DoF. If a scene attempts to load PostMagic while it is already loaded as a session plugin, it can cause your menu to no longer show in Desktop mode or your controllers to no longer function properly in VR mode.

For desktop mode, if this issue occurs, you can double tap the ‘M’ key to enter and exit camera mode which will return your menu functionality. However, there is no solution for VR mode and will require a reset of Virt-A-Mate. If you know a scene has PostMagic built in, you can avoid this issue by disabling PostMagic inside your session plugins before loading the scene.

Now, to add PostMagic to your session defaults, you will need to first load it into Session Plugins. In any scene, you can find this menu by first entering (1) edit mode, (2) clicking on the Session Plugins button, then (3) clicking on the Add Plugin button, and finally (4) clicking on the Select File… button.

Here you can (5) navigate to the MacGruber.PostMagic.3 var in the left panel of the file browser. After selecting it you will see files show up in the main panel. (6) Select MacGruber_PostMagic.cslist to load the plugin into your session.

Once PostMagic is loaded into the session, you may turn any effects on that you wish to always use such as LUTs or Anti-Aliasing. Whichever effects you turn on will be stored with the plugin inside the defaults.

Now to save your setup to load every time VAM is started, you will need to (7) click on the Session Plugin Presets button, then (8) click on Change User Defaults…, and finally (9) select Set Current As User Defaults. Upon clicking this button, you will be prompted to take a screenshot.

RESHADE SETUP

Initial installation

Now that we have the initial setup of PostMagic complete, you can exit fully out of Virt-A-Mate. If you downloaded my Preset Pack, extract the .ini files into your root directory of your VAM installation.

Locate where you downloaded ReShade and run the installation file. In the first screen during installation, you will be asked to select the app you would like to install ReShade for. The given choices listed will most likely not include Virt-A-Mate. If it does, select it and continue. If not, then (1) select Browse. A file browser will pop up. You will need to navigate to the directory in which you installed Virt-A-Mate and select the VaM.exe file. With the correct program selected, (2) choose Next.

In the next screen you will be asked which rendering API is used by VAM. Here you need to (3) select DirectX 10/11/12 then (4) click Next.

Now you will have the choice of preloading a preset before even starting ReShade. If you downloaded my preset pack, which I highly suggest you do if you are new to using ReShade, you can (5) select browse and choose which preset you would like to start with. I recommend Preset 3. Once you have once selected you can then (6) click Next to proceed.

Next you will be tasked with selecting which shaders you would like to install. Shaders are the effects that alter the appearance of VAM. Some are niche, some are useless, and some make major changes. I suggest (7) installing the shader packs that I have selected at minimum. Then (8) click next.

You will be asked to confirm the shaders for each pack, just continue to click Next until you are on the final screen.

You should end up reaching a screen that says the you successfully installed ReShade. It is now safe to click the Finish button to close out of the installation. ReShade should now automatically load each time you start VAM.

First run

Before we run VAM to set up ReShade within the program itself, lets finish extracting the files from my presets pack if you wish to use it. Previously you should have extracted the .ini preset files. Now that ReShade is installed you can extract the reshade-shaders folder inside the Zip file into the VAM root directory. You should get a prompt to overwrite a file, click Replace.

Open VAM. Once opened, you should see a prompt at the top of the screen to press the ‘Home’ key to start the ReShade tutorial. Wait until VAM fully loads into the main screen before attempting to press the ‘Home’ key.

Once you hit the ‘Home’ key it will ask you if you would like to proceed with the tutorial. If this is your first time using ReShade, I suggest going through it as it is not too long and gives a quick description of what each section is.

Changing to recommended settings

The ‘Home’ key is your default way to open the ReShade menu. If you would like to change this key you may do so while we change things in the Settings menu. If you have closed the ReShade menu reopen it. Once it is displayed, make sure to (1) select the Settings tab.

In settings I recommend (2) setting up your hotkeys. Here you can change how you open the ReShade menu. My setup is shown in the screenshot and I use the ‘Insert’ key to toggle all effects on/off so I can see how my work looks without ReShade turned on and I use the ‘Page Up’ and ‘Page Down’ keys to cycle through my presets so I can pick the right base look I want much easier.

The other 2 settings, Performance mode toggle and Effect reload key, aren’t as useful as the rest, but if you wish to set keys for them, then by all means do so.

Next let’s set up our Screenshot settings (3). If you previously used the SuperShot plugin, it will not capture the effects of ReShade. You will need to take screenshots through ReShade to be able to capture its effects. The default screenshot key is set to ‘Print Screen’. I see no reason to change this, but you may if you wish.

By default ReShade will save your screenshots to the root VAM folder. This will cause a big mess if you end up taking multiple shots. Lets create a new folder in your VAM directory called screenshots and point the ‘Screenshot path’ setting to that folder. You may change the name scheme as well, but it is much easier to leave it default and change the file names individually if you tend to name them differently depending on the scene.

Lastly you should choose what type of output file format you would like your screenshots to be. The default is PNG. This will make sure your screenshots have no loss in quality, but it will result in large file sizes. If you tend to edit your screenshots to do stuff such as add watermarks, this setting may be best as you can keep a raw full quality image as backup and save your watermarked version as JPG yourself. Alternatively if you tend to just take screenshots and post them directly, it may be best to change the format output to JPG so that your photos are a smaller file size by default.

You may also move the position of the ReShade screen by clicking and dragging the titlebar. I recommend docking it to the right side of the screen as to not cover up the VAM Menu.

Note: With the absence of SuperShot, to capture high resolution photos with ReShade such as 4k and 8k, assuming your monitor isn’t capable of these resolutions, you will need to use an external program such as SRWE so that you can resize your VAM window beyond your monitors size.

Setting up depth buffer

To set up the display depth settings so that you can use shaders such as Depth of Field and RayTracing, lets first make sure you have a scene open inside VAM so that you can access your session plugins.

Here you will need to (1) enable Edit Mode, (2) select your Session Plugins settings, and then you will need to (3) find your PostMagic plugin and ‘enable’ then ‘disable’ the plugin. Turning this setting on then off will allow ReShade to read the depth of the scene. Some scenes may cause ReShade to lose its correct depth settings and if you ever need to re setup the depth buffers, you will need to go through this step again.

Now we need to turn on display depth so that we can properly adjust our buffer settings. To do so you can either hit then ‘End’ key if you have my presets installed, or you can search for the DisplayDepth shader inside the shader list and (1) click to enable it.

Afterwards you may end up with either a black screen, a half blue and white screen, or a screen with a blue 3D mesh. We ultimately want a blue 3D mesh, so lets make sure we can get that as our result.

(2) Select the Add-ons tab to bring you to the Depth Buffer settings. In this menu you will (3) turn on all settings and (4) click through each depth buffer until you end up with a display like (5) that shows a blue/purple 3D model of the scene that your are in. The image may be upside down, which is ok, but if it is skewed or anything else then you will need to keep going through the list until you end up with a better result.

After choosing the correct Depth Buffer, we need to fix the issue with the reading being upside down. To do so (6) click the Home tab and then (7) click the Edit Global Preprocessor Definitions button. This will display (8) various options to adjust the depth reading. Since the image was upside down, we will set RESHADE_DEPTH_INPUT_IS_UPSIDE_DOWN to 1. Nothing will happen just changing the value. Hit the ‘Enter’ key to store the value and click out of the screen so that the menu closes. Your display should now (9) flip to display the correct image.

If your display is also reversed or you have blocky topographical edges, you will need to set the 1 value for the other 2 options.

Once everything is corrected, you are done. You can now either hit the ‘End’ key or click on the DisplayDepth shader to turn it off and ReShade can now read depth values on all your scenes. You can always check whether DepthBuffer is working at any time by turning on DisplayDepth for verification.

Note: If you ever end up with just a screen that is half white and half blue, that means that ReShade cannot read the depth of the scene and you will need either open back up PostMagic and toggle the DepthOfField on and off once again and/or choose a different depth buffer.

OTHER USEFUL INFORMATION

1. ReShade 5 comes with the ability to be used in any software when using SteamVR. This means that ReShade may load if you are viewing VAM with a VR Headset. Though it can be nice to see things in VR with post processing, some of the effects may cause more demand on your system in VR. I have included a Steam preset in my presets pack that disables all but 1 effect so that you can easily switch to is through the Steam interface instead of disabling all the effects on the preset you currently have loaded.

2. ReShade updates often. Though I don’t foresee a ReShade update breaking your ReShade installation, it has been known to happen. If you do not absolutely need to update it and you have a working installation your are happy with, I recommend just leaving the updates alone until a major update is released such as that from the 4.x version to the 5.x version.

3. If you have a preset that you really like and would like to make adjustments or play around with it but don’t want to lose your original settings, you can always duplicate the preset and mess with the new one created. Click the + button in the top right corner of the ReShade menu, check Duplicate current preset, type a new name for the preset, and hit the ‘Enter’ key to create it.

4. Performance mode can be really good for quicker loading of ReShade as it will only load the shaders that are enabled. However, having this setting enabled will not allow you to edit or toggle on/off any of your shaders. If you plan on not changing anything, then it is best to have this option on.

5. In my presets you will see multiple shaders above and in between the shaders I have turned on. These shaders have adjusted values by me and can be enabled to make small adjustments to the scene. I regularly enable a few of these additional shaders where it is required such as the CinematicDoF shader that enables Depth Of Field.

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If you have any questions, do not hesitate to reach out to me. I don't bite :3