GPose tutorial on Stagedepth.fx and how to practice your lighting with it. I will highlight a few in reply as always! “All Gposes are awesome, as long as they’re enjoyed throughout the process.”

I've gotten a lot of questions generally asking "How do I get better at lighting?" While my answer is "The more you play around with lighting, the better you'll get," there's a specific playground where I gained most of my lighting knowledge and experience. And that is inside your house — a "void" house, specifically. In-house is where there is no atmospheric lighting coming from anywhere. All lighting is set to zero when you're standing in the abyss, so every light you apply will be the only light source you have. Using Stagedepth, you can set a background image of your choice (I'll cover this in the next replies) and practice your lighting by trying to immerse your OC into the background photo using only lighting. Example: GShade with Stagedepth → GShade → Vanilla, in that order.

From a void house — well, any house really, since you're going to launch your OC into the abyss — set your OC's Y value to 50 or something. It should be around 19 by default, so setting it to 50 will launch your character into the abyss. Make sure you set your camera to the same Y value as your OC so the camera angle and height adjust to your OC naturally. Example 1; My house! But you don't need to have a void house, you can step into any house and launch yourself. Example 2&3; Setting your character and camera Y value to launch yourself into an abyss Exmple 4; Now the house is below you.

Set your time to night so there's no void sun hovering right on top of you. The sunlight creates unwanted lighting and shadows, which WILL get in the way of GPosing. Example 1; MY EYES Example 2; Phew, she gon

Now that your OC is launched into the abyss, it's time to find a background. While there are a lot of wonderful sites where you can get quality backgrounds, I use... Here you can find quality backgrounds. Make sure you check for "Free" images after searching. They usually come in great quality, often around 3K+ in width and height. Once you download the background, store it in your GShade "Textures" folder. Mine is set to… Users → Public → GShade Custom Shaders → Textures This way, GShade (or ReShade) can read the file through StageDepth.fx. After that, you're ready to load your image into GPose. Example 1; you can see the image I used. Example 2; My Textures folder!

Stagedepth.fx Stagedepth.fx → Preprocessor Definitions → StageTex This is where you punch in the name of your image. Simply type your file name, then .jpg or .png at the end. Don't forget to add quotation marks at the beginning and end of the file name. After that, you should see the background loaded onto your GShade screen. If you see a blank screen, please check the following: Did you put the image in the Textures folder? Did you correctly input the file name, ending with .jpg or .png? Did you forget the quotation marks? Example 1; Copy the file name - Click on StageTex - " - Ctrl+V - .jpg - " - Enter

When the image is first loaded, it's going to look ugly. That's because GShade or ReShade loads the image based on the values you have under StageDepth.fx rather than the image's natural dimensions, and that's completely fine, since you'll adjust the values manually. While it's pretty self-explanatory from the video, I need to go over Blending Mode. For Blending Mode, you'll either use Normal or Screen. If you use Normal, some transparent textures will be blocked, but it's useful if you're using StageDepth.fx outside your house. Screen mode, on the other hand, lets transparent textures show with the background behind them. It should only be used when posing in the void, as it will also let other in-game textures show through. Some cloths and hair carries transparent textures so it's worth noting. Example 1: Any image I load comes out ugly. Adjustment is necessary every time you load a different image, because the values shown are from the previous StageDepth image. Examples 2 & 3: The difference between Normal and Screen. You can see the fabric of the clothing blocked by the background image with Normal, and visible with Screen. Basically: void → Screen, anywhere that isn't the void → Normal.

Once you have the background image in the desired location and angle, and your poses are set, it's time to make your character shaded. Making your OC shaded will ensure the quality of the lighting you apply from this point. Your goal is to blend your OC into the background using nothing but lighting. When your lighting is having a hiccup, try adjusting the values in your lighting tab to see what's causing the issue, and fix it. Example 1: Making your OC shaded via Ktisis Lighting. In a void house, that is Ambient lighting. Example 2: Because my lighting was breaking apart, I went through every bit of the lighting values to identify what was causing it — troubleshooting.

Always think about how the lighting would affect your OC as if they were blended into the background. Direction, color, strength, and distance. Once you begin to feel comfortable using the background image in your GPose, your lighting game will be on a whole different level from the rest of the game. I hope this guide was helpful! “All GPoses are awesome, as long as they’re enjoyed throughout the process.”

oh btw, if you get called AI gposer by doing this - you made it lmao

This is perfection, thank you so much 🖤

Top tier as always. Can't wait to practice with this. I think I've been battling for too long with in game lighting, and my lack of lighting practice / knowledge has stunted me. Hopefully, this will help! Much appreciated always

Hope you have fun! :D

@cunnymawnkee Is stagedepth only an option in Ktisis or in Brio as well ? Because i have not found in Brio ( or might have overlooked it 😅). I never knew you could ad picture like that in a gpose

@cunnymawnkee It is an option from GShade and Reshade!

You've been really awesome since I've found you on here with your guides and stuff! Really handy for us folk wanting to get better. Not to mention the amazing gposes 🙏

Bruh, how is this free, literally a masterclass. I may miss some steps but getting better everyday. Thank you again Saki!

my man youre a freaking artist

Omg this looks so goood!, I wanna try to get back to gposing and lighting but I sturggle so baaad, maybe its just me but sometimes I have a hard time seeing colours so i just stick to like more darker colours! I need to find more frens to ask and get more tutorials!!

Heeeeello, another question... Do you know why your UI is hidden in the vertical preview? Mine is always black boxes or the ui itself. I have no clue why and it makes everything harder to edit because of the clutter. Looks great as always btw!

Try to play around the priority of vertical preview. Also, you can hide all UIs with a shortcut key. A button next to Delete.

what is that godray setting in reshade :OOO

Search for Godray! There should be on in Reshade as well.

🤤

Very good tutorial! Trying it out now and I think it does look very nice and is a big gamechanger for gposing!

Saki you are the best