NVIDIA Ansel and You: A Photo Mode for Planet Zoo

Planet Zoo lacks a dedicated photo mode, but that doesn't mean that you have no options. This guide details the use of NVIDIA Ansel to photograph animals in natural environments.

Intro

Planet Zoo is a phenomenal game, but from the get-go I've found it to be lacking in one key area: photography. There's simply no way to photograph your animals in a satisfactory manner. Most players resort to hiding the UI and taking pictures whilst in orbit camera, and though you can capture some great shots in spite of the restrictions, there's a lesser known method that totally changes the game...

This guide is intended to introduce people to and guide them on using NVIDIA Ansel. It'll break down key components of the app as well as a few tips I've learnt in my experience.

I truly hope this can be of use to people, and if you need any help, please feel free to ask away! This is more of a layman's guide than anything professional, as I'm just a beginner myself. Sans a table pulled from Wikipedia, I'm only using my own photographs here as I don't want to critique other people's work or use anything without permission.

Requirements

Sadly, Ansel is not a program available to everyone. You require a NVIDIA card ranging from the GTX 650 upwards. You can find a full list of supported graphics cards on NVIDIA's website[www.nvidia.com].

Ansel itself is bundled with both GeForce Experience[www.nvidia.com] and Nvidia's drivers.

Set-up

Whilst Ansel is included either with Nvidia's drivers or through GeForce Experience, you may want to tweak a few options to better customise your experience.

Image location can be customised by pressing Alt Z, selecting the cog icon in the bottom right beneath gallery, selecting the recordings button, and changing the video save location to wherever you want your media to be saved to.

Camera speed and a few other camera options are modified through the Ansel Configuration Utility. This is either found in the Program Files\NVIDIA Corporation\Ansel\Tools directory under the name NvCameraConfiguration.exe or it can be downloaded through Nvidia's website[international-gfe.download.nvidia.com].

ReShade filters - meaning colour overlays and such - work with Ansel and Freestyle[nvidia.custhelp.com]. They can be imported by creating the following directory if it doesn't already exist and placing your FX. files inside of them: "Program Files\NVIDIA Corporation\Ansel\Custom"

Controls

By default, Ansel is activated by pressing Alt + F2 whilst in-game.

LMB and your mouse moves the camera
WASD moves your position
Q and E pitch the camera left and right respectively
Z and X move the camera up and down respectively
Space activates the grid of thirds
Tab shifts the setting focus in the camera menu
Left and right arrow keys change the setting of the above focused setting

If you hold control whilst using any of the movement keys, it'll reduce your speed and allow for more precise control over your position.

Composition

The very first thing one must decide upon when shooting is what you want to capture. Everything else -- the framing, the lighting, the foreground and the background, the depth of field, the angle -- is in service of this wider goal. This can be a mood or a specific action, but the photo is composed around this central element.

I imagine many of us are familiar with the rule of thirds[en.wikipedia.org], but its ubiquitousness is because of its usefulness. Balancing your subject is, like everything else, contingent upon the rest of the photo. If it's cluttered but not framed to focus upon a single object, centring a subject can cause a schism in the viewer's focus. The rule of third is a simple method with which you can align subjects.

The background and foreground are supremely important, even if they play second fiddle to the main attraction. They can provide a counterbalance to dominant colours, complete the scene, and fill dead space. Backgrounds are generally filled by their very nature -- it's kind of hard not to capture what's behind the subject unless they completely fill the frame -- but the foreground has its own draws. Maybe the overgrown jungle[i.imgur.com] encroaches on the camera, or the snow and ice[i.imgur.com] have built up around it.

By and large, I prefer a shallow depth of field that accentuates a lone subject. In these types of photos, the background is complimentary, existing only to fill the void and set the stage. I tend to feel that photos work well when the animal's environment is represented, as opposed to unnatural and man-made objects. A blue sky feels too much like a blank blue slate, detracting too much from the focus whilst not particularly adding anything. Desaturating these secondary elements can better centre the viewer's focus.

Field of View

Perhaps the greatest strength of Ansel is its field of view option. Synonymous to a camera's angle of view[en.wikipedia.org], it controls the focal length of the digital camera.

Narrow fields of view give a sense of weight to every part of the animal. It grounds the hippo and makes it feel tangible. This angle of view will also lessen the perceived distance between objects. The only downside to it is that it makes the controls extremely sensitive due to just how much it zooms in, and you can cause fur textures to unload if going too narrow.

Neutral field of view. Not bad in and of itself, but you begin to see some of the telltale signs that come with the wider angle of views. The legs are lengthened, the belly is thiccer, and the head is elongated. This is roughly equivalent to the game's actual field of view.




That looks like a pig had a baby with a donkey, wtf? A wide angle of view distorts the proportions to a comical extent when taken to extremes. You'll see this a lot with Go-Pros and wide angle lenses in normal photography. For Planet Zoo, to me at least, it's essentially the antonym of desirable. It looks absolutely terrible.

Angle

It's no surprise that game photography utilises the skills of traditional photography, and why shouldn't it? The only difference is the medium. Angles in photography means the position of the camera relative to whatever it's shooting. Lets go over some basics.

Eye level: The camera isn't angled here, rather it's aligned with the eye line of the subject. Its strength is in its neutrality.
Low-angle[en.wikipedia.org]: Makes the subject appear larger and stronger, as if looking up at a giant.
High-angle[en.wikipedia.org]: Makes the subject appear smaller and weaker; think of it as looking down on someone.
Dutch angles[en.wikipedia.org] consist of tilting the camera horizontally. It's generally taken to depict unease and discomfort, but I personally feel it adds quite a bit of dynamism to images.

There's dozens of other camera angles I assume I'm missing here -- think along the line of bird's eye view shots -- but I feel the above four cover the need-to-knows for... fake animal photography?

Depth of Field

Depth of field is "the distance between the nearest and the farthest objects that are in acceptably sharp focus in an image". In simpler terms, it controls what's visible and what's blurred. It allows you to focus the viewer's eye onto the subject whilst concealing the background and framing the image. The depth of field is a hugely important aspect of photography.

The filter can be found under the, well, depth of field option. It has four options, and the ability to invert the depth of field on the Z and Y-axis.

• Focus Depth[streamable.com]: The point where the camera will focus
  
• Far blur curve[streamable.com]: Controls the blur behind the focus point
  
• Near blur curve[streamable.com]: Controls the blur in front of the focus point
  
• Blur radius[streamable.com]: Intensity of the blur

There's also a separate filter called Auto Depth of Field which automatically focuses the camera. Though it works, it doesn't allow for the same control as the normal depth of field filter does, and so I'd advise against it.

Colour Temperature

In photography, colour temperature [en.wikipedia.org] refers to the "warmth" (yellows) and "coolness" (blues) of the colours in an image. Wikipedia's breakdown of temperatures lists many examples, the most relevant being sunrise and sunset (red), horizon daylight (pale red), vertical daylight (very pale red), daylight (white), and the poleward sky (deep blue).



There's a clear trajectory from the warmer mornings to the more neutral white during the day, dipping into cooler temperatures when reaching the poles. Ansel includes the ability to tweak the temperature alongside a few other options under the "color" filter:

• Tint Color[streamable.com]: An additional rainbow filter
  
• Tint Intensity[streamable.com]: Intensity of the above tint control
  
• Temperature[streamable.com]: Warmth and coolness
  
• Vibrance[streamable.com]: Intensity of the colours

This is the same image in three different temperatures: cool, neutral white, and warm. I settled on the latter, as to me this shot is ideal warm. This is a lion in a savanna. He's basking in the warmth of the rising sun, reflected in his eyes. It radiates off of him and highlights his golden mane. If you go cooler, you start to lose the same effect. It no longer pops. Colder temperatures tend to be regarded as more serious, alert, and unemotional, whereas warmer temperatures are held to be more inviting, relaxed, and homely.

Nonetheless, the temperature shouldn't rely exclusively on the conditions shown. It's heavily contingent on the feeling you're trying to elicit. Is it a gentle image? A harsh one? A mother and pup? Are your animals fighting to the death? Is your tiger prowling through the dark of night? Are you showing two animals cuddling? At the end of the day, a photograph is the sum of its parts. It's not as simple as lining up a shot. Colour temperature is one of many elements that brings a picture together.

Feel free to throw the above out if your zoo is located in Mexico. As per Breaking Bad, it has to be yellow no matter the situation.

Other Effects

Though it includes many other filters, most are relatively superfluous in my opinion. In any case, it'd be remiss of me not to mention them.

• Black & White[streamable.com]: Desaturates the image from a point of your choosing
  
• Colorblind[i.imgur.com]: A nice set of accessibility options, the colourblind filter has settings for protanopia[streamable.com], deuteranopia[streamable.com], and tritanopia[streamable.com]
  
• Details[i.imgur.com]: Gives you control over the clarity of textures as well as the bloom, that being the brightness of light
  
• Green Screen[streamable.com]: Allows you to set a solid colour at a depth of your choosing. It's not particularly useful, but if you planned on doing any post-processing, you could swap out backgrounds
  
• Letterbox[streamable.com]: Adds black bars on the horizontal or vertical ends of the image
  
• Night mode[i.imgur.com]: Despite what its name implies, I have zero idea what this filter is actually for lol. At day it just makes things look like you're in hell, and at night it makes things indiscernible
  
• Old film[i.imgur.com]: An animated filter that mimics ye olde films
  
• Posterise[i.imgur.com]: This filter... is one I don't know how to explain, so here's the Wikipedia definition: "the conversion of a continuous gradation of tone to several regions of fewer tones, causing abrupt changes from one tone to another"
  
• Sharpen / Sharpen+[i.imgur.com]: Much like the above details, sharpen increases the clarity of textures
  
• SpecialFX[i.imgur.com]: A filter with more filters inside! How fun. Retro[streamable.com], sketch[streamable.com], half-tone[streamable.com], and sepia[streamable.com] options galore. You can mix and match them
  
• Splitscreen[i.imgur.com]
  
• Stickers[i.imgur.com]: Another self-explanatory filter that overlays emojis and other images over the frame
  
• Tilt-shift[i.imgur.com]: There's a whole lot of technical mumbojumbo that, frankly, goes over my head, but the version for dummies (ie me) is that you can vary the depth of field rather than the flat focal plane of the normal one. It's great for creating a razor sharp focus on a single axis.
  
• Vignette[i.imgur.com]: These are images with faded edges. In this case, you get a black fade that you can control the intensity of
  
• Watercolor[i.imgur.com]: Yet another filter that replicates the art style from which it derives its name. There's a ton of options with this one

If there's anything to take away from this list, it's that I don't know what I'm talking about. One thing I'd keep in mind with the image examples above is that they're showing extremes. Sharpen looks odd when maxed out on that hippo, but not so much when sitting around 5%~ on the tiger[i.imgur.com].

Capture Type

There's a few options when actually taking the image, most of which are self-explanatory. First and foremost is the simple screenshot. All this does is take an image of your screen sans the Ansel menu. It's analogous to Steam's regular screenshotting.

Super resolution takes dozens and potentially hundreds of images in your native resolution, compiling them to build the resolution you've selected. For example, a 21,120 x 11,880 super resolution photograph will take 441 images at 1080p for a total size of 3.3 GB. You can go up to 63,360 x 35,640 -- a whopping 30.8 GB for a single image! I only play in 1080p, but all of the screenshots I upload are shot in this mode.



360° is an omnidirectional shot that photographs both your camera's frame and the surrounding visual plane.


Stereo / Stereo 360° are the same as both the screenshot and the super resolution options, except they shoot in 3D.

Environmental Effects

Frontier has added multiple special effects for use in habitats, which luckily can double as fantastic photography props.

Because the mist special effect is flexicolour, you're able to customise it into a wide variety of different effects. It can be used as fog (white), smoke (grey) and dust clouds (brown).


Bubbles are greatly beneficial, both as apart of the natural water effect as well as the additional special effect jets.

A key thing to remember here is what kind of coverage you're after. Because you can overlap effect pieces as many times as you'd like, a thick fog or snow cover is contingent only on how many pieces you place down!

Projection Screen Backgrounds

If you're after a particular type of background in your photos, it's always possible to use projection screens with any kind of photo on them as your backdrop.

Moon by José Eugenio Gómez Rodríguez[commons.wikimedia.org]. Iceberg background by Lars Bugge Aarset[www.pexels.com]

You can add these to the game by navigating to Documents > Frontier Developments > Planet Zoo > UserMedia.


As per /u/squid854, The ratio for all of the projection and tv screens is 16:9. The dimensions of each object are:

• Projection Screens (8m, 16m, 32m) - 1824 x 1024px
  
• TV Screen (4m), Projection Screen (4m), - 912 x 512px
  
• TV Screens (1m, 2m) - 456 x 256px

If you're going to do this, make sure you credit whoever's photo you're using!

Simple Runtime Window Editor (SRWE)

Frans Bouma / Otis_Inf is a legendary game photographer who has developed a number of tools to expand one's possibilities. Simple Runtime Window Editor[github.com], more commonly known as SRWE, is a program that allows the user to resize a game's window to a set ratio and resolution. I tend to use SRWE in a low resolution aspect ratio in tandem with NVIDIA Ansel's super resolution.

ReShade

ReShade[reshade.me] is a post-processing modification for games that's often used in tandem with photo modes for a variety of reasons. It's simple to setup, functions with Planet Zoo, has a variety of effects that can be of use to digital wildlife photographers, and it gives the user finer control over its effects. For my purposes, I tend to stick with Otis_Inf's tools, as his are tailor made for photography.

Contributors to the program have created many filters which aren't included with Ansel, such as motion blur, height fog, and more niche camera effects. ReShade is not an obligatory element with Planet Zoo photography, but it works very well in a secondary role to enhance your images.

Miscellaneous Tips

World Conditions: Sandbox is ideal for photography, as you have greater control over the world. The ability to control the time of day lets you change the lighting and mood immediately together with weather settings. This is in comparison to most of the game's other options, which have randomised weather and a locked time.

Hiding Animals: Some of my favourite shots have come from animals showing aggression. Since this is usually only fights with one another, I've found it works best to chuck two males together or overcrowd a habitat to instigate fights. However, that means there's always two in a frame, and sometimes you just want to photograph a lion roaring without having to show two of them fighting. Once you've got the model in an animation you want to photograph, simply activate the orbit camera on it, position your camera inside of the opposing animal they're fighting which you don't want to have pictured, and activate Ansel. This will turn them invisible and free up your camera to photograph the subject freely.

Lighting: Clicking L whilst in the normal game will activate your torch. You can position it wherever you want for some extra lighting, and then activate Ansel to lock it in place. Similarly, you can use the actual prop lighting in the construction menu and hide them out of frame if need be.

Natural Backgrounds: This is a zoo game, and so for most of us, our animals are kept in habitats. I've come across many situations where everything but the background clicks in a picture, often due to visible guests, staff, habitat walls, paths, etc. Recently, one thing that has worked swimmingly for me is to temporarily remove everything within the field of view and to build some natural environments to fill in the void. It lets you achieve realistic looking shots without having to go through the trouble of assembling an entire natural environment.

If all you're after is photos, don't build an environment and wait for the animals to get into the right position. Pause when you've got the animation you want to shoot, and build the environment around the animal!

Uploading Custom Screenshots to Steam

Uploading custom screenshots, meaning anything taken outside of the native screenshotting as apart of the Steam Overlay, is a little bit tricky. There's a couple methods, but the easiest in my experience is to simply edit a pre-existing screenshot.

Step 1: Take an image in game using the Steam Overlay. By default, this is F12.



Step 2: Navigate to Planet Zoo's screenshot tab by finding it in your library and scrolling down. It's found on the righthand side of the page, beneath friends who play, achievements, notes, trading cards, DLC and Steam Workshop.



Step 3: Click the "Show on disk" folder icon to open the Planet Zoo screenshot folder in your file browser.



Step 4: Open the screenshot you took, copy and paste the one you wish to upload in its place, and save the file. I do the same to the corresponding thumbnail as well, which is located in the thumbnails folder that is inside the initial screenshots folder.



Step 5: Exit Steam and relaunch it.

Step 6: Upload the screenshot as per normal by accessing the aforementioned screenshot management tab shown in step 2. The file that uploads should now be your custom screenshot.

[DrgGaming]

Thanks for the write-up, this information is really helpful.

[Imagica]

thank you prophet <3 :D

[Prophet32889]

That hippo screenshot looks like it was taken irl instead of the game, these edits and effects are POWERFUL. Im gonna favorite this. Thanks for the guide!

[KatePlayz]

Thank you so much this is very helpful!!

[Imagica]

I had the feeling! So 100%, the very first thing I do is turn the blur radius to maximum. That essentially just controls how intense the blur is.

The far blur curve controls how strong the blur is after the focus point, and the near blur curve controls how strong the blur is before the focus point. So setting those to minimum means that the blur is as narrow as it can possibly be. Focus depth then lets you basically set it with pinpoint accuracy, and then you can mess around with the other settings to control more of your blur

[KatePlayz]

That is what I was struggling with honestly is to get the focus to pinpoint where I wanted it to be! I will try that when I get in-game next thank you!

[Imagica]

Hey Kate, what issue in particular are you having with DoF? I find turning the blur up to maximum (the bottom slider) and the near and far focus to their lowest (the second and third bars) helps to pinpoint your focus. Then the first bar, the focus depth, can be used to narrowly pinpoint the range

[KatePlayz]

This is an amazing guide thank you! I find a struggle a bit with getting the depth of feild settings right. Do you have any additional tips/resources for how to use the settings under that filter?

[gjdavis20]

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[garydripps]

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