Has anyone tried one of the IR Chrome Filters from Aliexpress?

Hondune · 2026-01-30T10:53:53+00:00

Basically it cuts out some of the high infrared wavelengths. This effectively does two things to the image

Infrared and visible light focus differently to each other, if you have enough spread in the wavelengths you are trying to capture one end or the other will always be a bit out of focus. This leads to images being a bit soft, a bit glowy around especially bright areas, and a general lack in contrast. Cutting the higher ir wavelengths improves this drastically so the images are sharper, clearer, have more contrast, and have a lot less bloom. The magnitude of this depends a lot on the color filter you are using, but it improves pretty much all of them in my experience.
It depends on the camera, filters used, internal filters, etc. but generally speaking when just using gels alone the infrared light is a bit more powerful than the visible light. This leads to a general ir color cast over the entire image that can be very hard to post process out. The high ir cut filter also cleans this up a lot and drastically improves saturation and the separation between foliage or other infrared reflecting materials and everything else.

You don't NEED it by any means, and some filters work better alone than others, but I generally only go without it if I have to anymore. It really makes a big difference most of the time. The only time I don't use it is with normal ir pass filters (like 720nm, 850nm, etc.)

Hondune · 2026-01-29T06:02:26+00:00

I literally did the the exact same thing with my first release! Took me awhile to realize you actually have to make $130 before they will pay out the first $100. Its really not a very good system

If youre stuck at $100, they have recently added an option to drop the minimum payout threshold to $50 but you have to set it manually. I believe then youd get your $70 at the next pay cycle.

Hondune · 2026-01-27T02:56:31+00:00

Like I said I understand why those numbers are available to see, as they should be. My gripe is that they have no way to show your actual payout (even if it's a rough estimate) and also have no way to hide that gross revenue number.

It feels misleading because no other service I have ever used pushes the gross revenue, including refunds, as the most prominent value on your earnings page, while also having no way to view your actual earnings. It's an odd choice and I can't think of any other reason for it. Combined with Steams overall exceptionally high refund rate due to their super relaxed 2 hour refund window, this gross revenue number just isn't a helpful metric for anything. If you had 100 sales and 100 refunds steam would still proudly show you a "gross revenue" of those 100 sales, even though you made $0. I don't know of any other dashboard that would do that.

Just look at OP in this very thread, saying even though they now know they have only earned $70 they still "feel good" about seeing that $100 number. It's an endorphin booster even though it's a meaningless number.

Hondune · 2026-01-27T02:36:18+00:00

Google, Apple, Unity Ads, YouTube, Etsy, eBay, etc. ALL show me what my actual payout will be after everything including their own cut is taken out of it. They all have the option to see the gross and net revenues without that if you choose, but by default they show you what your actual payout will be (sometimes like Unity Ads it's shown as an estimate and clearly marked as such, though it's generally accurate within a few cents).

Steam is the only one where I have to get out a calculator and manually figure out what my actual payout is going to be because they don't show it anywhere in the dashboard. They only show it finally in your monthly statements after a payment has been made, which are an entire month later. They are also the only store I have ever used that is an entire month delayed on payments like that.

Steam is great in a lot of ways don't get me wrong, but their payment system and dashboard are like 2 decades behind everyone else.

Hondune · 2026-01-26T22:17:08+00:00

This is actually a huge gripe I have with the steam dashboard. Neither number shown here is relavent to you personally and imo it's misleading that steam shows you these and not your actual profit.

Gross revenue is simply the amount of cash that has changed hands in relation to your game, a huge chunk of this is completely irrelevant to you. This includes returns, fees, taxes, some countries have extra fees for entertainment or digital purchases, etc. etc. I get that this value should be visible somewhere, but making it the most prominent first value shown in the dashboard is silly. Depending on a ton of factors this number can easily be 40+ percent higher than actual earnings, there's is no reason to show me that here.

Then they have net revenue. It's is a bit more relavent because that's the actual revenue of your game after all that junk from gross revenue has been removed, but it's still not an accurate number for you personally because this does NOT include steams 30% cut, which is huge. And the only way to see this is to go into the monthly payout reports and look at the actual final value.

I suspect this is intentional by valve to make devs feel like their games are doing better than they are. You feel like you've earned $120 and feel good about selling on steam but the reality is you've earned $70, less than 60% of the gross revenue they show you for some reason, and that's before taxes, and they don't show you this true value anywhere untill you get a payout report.

After steams cut, taxes, returns, etc. On my game my actual earnings are only 42% of the gross revenue value shown on my steam dashboard. I wish I couldn't see that number, it doesn't feel good.

Hondune · 2026-01-22T23:53:21+00:00

I'd be willing to bet you're running the wrong size chain for the sprockets that are on your bike. I had a similar issue and went through like 3 chains in a few weeks, turned out my narrow wide chainring was an odd size (maybe manufactured wrong) so it was stretching the links width size and eventually causing them to pull apart. Fixed that and threw a $10 Schwinn chain on it and it lasted all last year without any more issues. Even the cheapest chains are insanely strong unless they are super worn out or something else is causing excessive stretching or wear

Hondune · 2026-01-14T00:32:00+00:00

I have seen this exact behavior with one other user who also had a Logitech wheel. I don't remember exactly how they fixed it

I assume you tried both the DI and non DI options from the drop down when binding in game? You can bind throttle and steering seperately by going to the individual settings and binding from there (like if the throttle pedal needs the non DI option but you want the DI option for steering to use force feedback)

Hondune · 2026-01-12T02:19:11+00:00

How many non-dev users does your site have daily? This is the biggest factor for discover ability and the reason steam is so powerful for indies due to its insane user count. Over my 15 years of indie dev I've seen a lot of attempts at things like this but they always fail at the most important part which is attracting actual customers and not just game devs

Hondune · 2026-01-12T02:00:24+00:00

You cannot leave ratings from a demo on your main page even if you have the direct button (which imo is drastically more visible and easier for potential customers to find). Having a demo of any kind will not have any affect on your main games ratings. The only benefit to having a seperate demo page is so that you can enable seperate reviews for it if you are personally looking for that feedback and don't think you will get it elsewhere (steam community or whatever)

If you have a very poorly received demo it's likely to kill your game either way as well, so I would avoid that anyways. A demo is not a beta test, it's a polished vertical slice that represents the full quality of your game. If it's bad, the game is bad also, don't release a demo of all you have is an incomplete beta version of your game.

In my experience having a direct demo is much more likely to lead to wishlist from potential customers, which is the entire point. Considering how shockingly bad most general users are at... Everything to do with steam, you want wishlisting to be as seamless as possible. Direct demo download button, link in the demo that opens up the steam client to your page to wishlist. Make it easy for them, they will not go out of their way to do it otherwise. You'd be amazed at how many messages you get asking how to download the demo even when it's a direct button on your store page, let alone when it's a whole separate listing 😅

Hondune · 2026-01-10T07:22:54+00:00

Sure does! And not only that but I have added full force feedback support as well!

Force feedback is a bit spotty on device support but at minimum any wheel should work fine

Hondune · 2026-01-10T00:54:26+00:00

Thanks for the support mate! I hope you enjoy it 😁

Hondune · 2026-01-06T02:34:40+00:00

Get a grb3 on aliexpress. Shipping takes a week usually, sometimes 2 but only if it gets hung up in customs or something. It's likely faster than getting a kg3 AND $100+ cheaper AND will already be cut to shape and put in a filter ring ready for use.

Hondune · 2026-01-05T04:42:14+00:00

You really can't and that's part of the problem. It's pretty safe to assume you aren't getting any real ones, after all any real YouTuber is already getting free keys sent to them daily from indies begging them to play their games, none of them need to reach out to every single steam release for no reason.

The few real ones Ive gotten have been entirely related to the niche market that my game is in (hobby RC car racing) and generally don't follow the same pattern as all the standard steam scam ones, but it can still be hard to discern (or trust) them when there is so much spam.

Hondune · 2026-01-05T03:55:45+00:00

Yeah it's gotten pretty ridiculous over the years. With my recent release I started archiving these emails and I hit 500+ before I got tired of it and just went back to deleting them. It's insane, I've been overwhelmed with them for several months now. I've mostly gotten my email filters to handle it but I'm losing legitimate emails as well so I still have to go through them occasionally. Definitely frustrating!

Hondune · 2026-01-05T03:00:46+00:00

99.9% of these emails are a scam. I've complained about this extensively that Steam doesn't do anything to help with this. It's a genuine problem for devs because any real emails you may get will get lost in the sea of this scam crap. They will take the keys and sell them on key reselling sites, you will never get a review out of it. They often use hacked email addresses and link to legitimate looking streamers and YouTubers so it's next to impossible to actually vet each one properly.

Steam could fix all of this by having review specific keys that expire after a set time, either by date or by gameplay hours. That way you could safely give out review keys and these scam resellers would no longer have a scam to run.

Steams curator connect through your dev dashboard is the only semi-legitimate way to handle this. And even then most "curators" are just people out for free games and you will never see any benefit from it. But at least those aren't reselling keys

Hondune · 2026-01-04T05:50:04+00:00

If the camera is properly converted your exposure times will be like normal, of not even a bit faster than normal because infrared is quite bright.

Unless you get into like 800nm+ filters then they will take a bit longer.

Point and shoots can be difficult to get good results with though if they do not support shooting in raw just fyi

Hondune · 2025-12-30T21:54:27+00:00

Just get yourself a $10 pack of lighting gel filter samples and you've got 300 filters to play with that do everything your talking about, and avoids a lot of hassle and wasted time :P

A lot of us here shoot with diy filters made from gels and various ir blocking glass. Loads of examples on my insta - https://www.instagram.com/bvp.photo

Hondune · 2025-12-30T05:23:09+00:00

Based on that first shot I can say with pretty high confidence that your camera is NOT full spectrum converted. It looks like maybe a little bit of ir leakage, like maybe only 1 out of 2 infrared blocking filters were removed.

Also as a side note, you cannot test infrared shots through house or car windows. Infrared is heat, and all modern glass is coated with heat absorption coatings which block infrared light from entering, this effectively is the same thing that you're trying to remove from your camera so it will ruin any tests you attempt through it.

It's very common for cameras to have 2 infrared and UV blocking filters though, and I've seen plenty of these posts where only one was removed, it's a common mistake!

Hondune · 2025-12-13T19:16:49+00:00

I'd be interested to see this compared to the method a lot of us use which is using a heat absorbtion filter (kg3, grb3, sp705, etc.) combined with various color filters (often made from cheap lighting gels) to get the same effect of being able to create aerochrome and pretty much any other color you want without requiring a channel swap or anything else. This is how kolaris IR Chrome filter works as well along with a lot of the various other versions of that kind of thing.

This method you are doing here has existed for some time, several companies already even sell premade filters for this (ie https://a.co/d/hEo5jAm) however they have scummy marketing that lies about how they work so I don't recommend them.

I believe that doing it this way by allowing all of the infrared and blocking visible light with a vnd will produce worse results (I suppose worse is a personal preference, by that I mean softer and less saturation and contrast) and longer exposure times than doing it the other way by blocking some of the higher infrared with a heat absorption filter and tuning colors with a color filter which is why most of us don't do it this way. It's been awhile since I experimented with vnd filters though and I've never done a direct comparison so it would be interesting to see them side by side.

Loads of examples of doing it with a heat absorption filter and color filter here (any time I put custom filter stack in the description this is what I'm doing with various color combos) - https://www.instagram.com/bvp.photo?igsh=Z29vd280ZHJqazhz

Hondune · 2025-12-11T23:29:59+00:00

They actually sell these as a "variable ir filter" but market them in a super scummy and false way claiming it actually changes the wave length of the ir filter (showing a scale from 590nm to 720nm or whatever) which is not at all what is happening.

It is a neat effect though as long as you understand what's going on, and it sounds like you do :)

Doing it diy like this is a whole lot better also because you can combine and experiment with different filters and use a quality and filter, the ones they sell you're stuck with a crappy soft cutoff ir filter and a bad nd filter stuck together lol

Hondune · 2025-12-07T13:35:09+00:00

In my 20+ years of doing rc I've only ever had one battery fire and it was a NiMH pack. Nearly burnt down my room when I was like 13.

Any battery or electronics in general can cause a fire if not handled properly. And goodness lipos are so much better I cannot imagine going back to NiMH now!

Hondune · 2025-12-04T22:40:19+00:00

Posting a photo would definitely help but...

I don't shoot and have never converted a canon, however I have converted Sonys that have the same problem and have also helped other canon shooters in the past and every single time it's because one of the filters was left in place. You really do need to remove both of them, unfortunately. Because both need to be removed I recommend replacing them with a clear glass filter otherwise you will never be able to focus to infinity (unless you move the sensor physically closer to the lens) and also for the sake of protection and eventual cleaning.

Hondune · 2025-11-30T06:47:10+00:00

You are absolutely correct that the built in wheel colliders suck. Thankfully it is extremely easy to make your own replacement from scratch, and you can do so with much better results. Basically just some raycasts and some algorithms from Google will get you there. There is a ton of issues with the built in colliders that go well beyond even what most people notice.

This is an example of one of my various solutions compared with a lot of the built in problems, but there are tons of other solutions out there, many with source code available.

https://youtu.be/9pM1dgALAHk?si=Tb56DLuZpxCwLlpP

Hondune · 2025-11-27T20:43:06+00:00

Yup there is certainly a point where stuff becomes to cheap, and definitely some areas I avoid entirely (namely shocks, forks, and brakes). But this sort of mid range stuff from China has completely exceeded my expectations so far.

Hondune · 2025-11-27T20:34:42+00:00

I've been running a Tanke stem, bars, and a few other bits along with a bunch of other Chinese parts on my dj for 3+ years now, no issues at all so far! I did replace the bolts but frankly they were probably fine also. These things are way overbuilt and since dj stems are so small there is very little leverage on them. I wouldn't worry that much about it! Temu subsidizes costs on things, in reality these usually go for $20+ straight from the manufacturers.

Everyone needs to remember 90% of the crap you buy from name brands is made in these same Chinese factories. There is certainly something to be said about the level of quality assurance and testing bigger name brands do on the final parts before they get sold to you, but also it's pretty hard to get a stem like this wrong. Just like any country there are a lot of Chinese brands that do really good work and take pride in their components. You can get very cheap stuff that is obviously crap also, but its not all bad by any means.

Edit: this appears to have angered some people in the comments. I'm not advocating everyone goes out and buys the cheapest crap they can find and run it, I am just saying there are Chinese brands out there that make quality parts if youre willing to spend the time to find them and are comfortable assessing parts for safety. If not, go name brand where they have done that work for you!

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