How Are Games Rendering Fur?

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  • Опубликовано: 29 окт 2023
  • Get an exclusive @Surfshark deal! Enter promo code ACEROLA for an extra 3 months free at surfshark.deals/acerola #ad
    It's easy to understand why fur is extremely problematic with its high density of objects and physical complexities, but somehow games have been rendering it for years! How could something so complex be so easily simplified?
    Topics covered: Hair and its rendering complexities, shell texturing, half lambert, shell texturing applications, limitations of the technique, and overdraw
    Code: github.com/GarrettGunnell/She...
    Support me on Patreon!
    / acerola_t
    Socials:
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    Resources:
    hhoppe.com/fur.pdf
    xbdev.net/misc_demos/demos/fu...
    thegamedev.guru/unity-gpu-per...
    www.gamedev.net/forums/topic/...
    Music:
    Afternoon Break - Persona 3 OST
    This Mysterious Feeling - Persona 3 OST
    Midori Eyes - Paradise Killer OST
    During The Test - Persona 3 OST
    Junes Theme - Persona 4 OST
    Every Day Is Night - VA-11 Hall-A OST
    Underground Club - VA-11 Hall-A OST
    Those Who Dwell In The Shadows - VA-11 Hall-A OST
    Your Love Is A Drug - VA-11 Hall-A OST
    GO!GO!STYLE - Paradise Killer OST
    Joy - Persona 3 OST
    Sandgem Town - Pokemon Diamond OST
    Like A Dream Come True - Persona 4 OST
    Layer Cake - Persona 5 OST
    Prof. Omochao - Sonic Adventure 2 OST
    Thanks for watching!
    This video is dedicated to my friend, Alotryx.
    #acerola #graphics #gamedev #unity3d #graphics #shaders
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Комментарии • 1,2 тыс.

  • @Acerola_t
    @Acerola_t  7 месяцев назад +134

    Get an exclusive @Surfshark deal! Enter promo code ACEROLA for an extra 3 months free at surfshark.deals/acerola #ad
    Thanks for watching!!

    • @Levi1440p
      @Levi1440p 7 месяцев назад +9

      can we all just appreciate Acerola's genius idea in using a double video, a technique that emerged with the advent of tiktok and quick videos on social platforms as a method of hooking the audience using super stimulation techniques so that people don't skip videos that might seem uninteresting on their own (like an advertisement)? very well thought out and implemented, with the use of a race that dominates the internet. genuinely brilliant and honest, so good in fact that I didn't skip an ad for the first time in a long time. thank you Acerola, thank you.

    • @releasemeeee
      @releasemeeee 7 месяцев назад +2

      Hey Acerola!
      Great content so far! Really look forward to your take on how glass works in games, this had been the most daunting topic for me as a videogame artist 😟
      Would be a blast if you showed how to deal with it and achieve best results.
      I personally haven't achieved even a somewhat adequate refraction behavior in years I've been into Unreal 🙃

    • @binkbonkbones3402
      @binkbonkbones3402 7 месяцев назад

      I want to make a mobile game where the galaxy is full of basically dandelions that float around instead of planets, and each sphere can be traversed like mario galaxy
      Could you maybe do a video on how to do gravity that connects to bodies in space instead of indiscriminately falling down?
      Also, I'm curious if I could just declare a point in space, and project these shell texture grass effects in all directions from there? Also, by extension if I can declare one point in space can I also declare a distance from that point representing the circumference of the body in space and creating the ground?
      Not gonna lie, it would be pretty ideal if I could just render each body is space as a basic point in space, and move them around from there
      Also, I just realised the directional tilting could lend itself well to an effect of being like the tail of a comet giving it it's distinct flaring light look
      Also, how do you think the smoke effects you previously spoke of would apply to stuff like nebulas and space clouds? Does it scale well? I want it to have a very "cosmic ocean" aesthetic, and making big areas of space different colored clouds would be cool

    • @DarkerCry
      @DarkerCry 7 месяцев назад +1

      Just wanted to say this is a super useful video, really appreciate that the code is also available. Especially for the fake physics.

    • @zyth8241
      @zyth8241 7 месяцев назад

      Shaft studio?

  • @m_remon
    @m_remon 7 месяцев назад +786

    God I just realized he's wearing more layers as time passes.
    Amazing.

    • @Yixdy
      @Yixdy 7 месяцев назад +12

      Dude, spoilers

    • @mmiles9734
      @mmiles9734 6 месяцев назад +12

      ​@@Yixdystill opens comments before watching video 😅

    • @PaulFisher
      @PaulFisher 6 месяцев назад

      And some pretty good bands among them too!

    • @ashtoncartner
      @ashtoncartner Месяц назад +2

      I watched the entire video without realising even once

  • @AB-Prince
    @AB-Prince 7 месяцев назад +1092

    one technique I've seen to hide the gaps between shells, is to distribute the shells such that the gaps are bigger at the bottom and smaller near the top. as the denser lower layers do a good job of masking the gaps but the upper sparse layers need denser layers to hide the gaps

    • @Acerola_t
      @Acerola_t  7 месяцев назад +418

      This functionality is in my shader code I didn't expressly mention it tho

    • @ludfde
      @ludfde 7 месяцев назад +17

      Couldn't you slightly offset the normal of the quads using noise?

    • @KillahMate
      @KillahMate 7 месяцев назад +38

      @@ludfde Instead of being randomly offset, wouldn't we always want the normals to slightly face the camera?

    • @AB-wf8ek
      @AB-wf8ek 7 месяцев назад +8

      I wonder if there's some aspect of gaussian splatting that could be applied.
      As far as I understand, it's using blurry splats that take camera position into place to replace the points in a point cloud.
      Perhaps blurry shells that also take into account camera position?

    • @tonygamer4310
      @tonygamer4310 7 месяцев назад +6

      @@ludfde unfortunately no. That operation has to be done in the vertex shader pass, and each layer only has four vertices, so you could only apply it to the very corners of the grass, not to each individual blade. If you wanted something like that, you'd have to find a way to bake it into the pixel rendering shader, which would get extremely complicated very quickly

  • @julianlanty2066
    @julianlanty2066 7 месяцев назад +162

    I imagine Acerola in a party corner like "they dont know how to render realtime hair"

  • @SaadTheGlad
    @SaadTheGlad 7 месяцев назад +1831

    These videos are genuinely one of two things I look forward to on RUclips, the other being Sebastian Lague videos. Great stuff.

    • @Superhirn
      @Superhirn 7 месяцев назад +9

      same

    • @wack9175
      @wack9175 7 месяцев назад +60

      Sebastian Lague my beloved

    • @deadsince1996
      @deadsince1996 7 месяцев назад +13

      and Stuff Made Here.

    • @Adam-zt4cn
      @Adam-zt4cn 7 месяцев назад +36

      Code Parade is one I can recommend.
      He is another great example of this style of technical, but beautifully explained coding projects.

    • @_jax
      @_jax 7 месяцев назад

      Yess

  • @evilotis01
    @evilotis01 7 месяцев назад +685

    1:40 "a game with a protagonist with a beautiful head of hair but gets [transported?] into a universe where everyone is bald and is trying to kill them with having hair" and that was how Acerola made his fortune

    • @MathewAlden
      @MathewAlden 7 месяцев назад +110

      The word you're looking for is "isekai'd".
      But "transported" is a fair synonym.

    • @DoktorBeta
      @DoktorBeta 7 месяцев назад +58

      literally just the world of Bobobo-bo Bo-bobo

    • @dreckneck
      @dreckneck 6 месяцев назад +8

      As a guy with long hair entering my thirties, this is an accurate description of my life imo

    • @TalynStormcrow
      @TalynStormcrow 6 месяцев назад

      Brave video game, all the enemies are helmeted warriors. The end boss is a bear that glitches the game out but you use the glitches to defeat them.

    • @glowstickspinalfluid
      @glowstickspinalfluid 6 месяцев назад +5

      i am incredibly bored so i'm gonna be a massive nerd for a second. isekai is a popular genre of anime, where a character is magically transported into another universe. the method of transportation is usually the character getting hit by a truck and a god taking pity on their untimely death. the popularity and weirdness of the genre gets it a more emotional reaction than just "transportation"

  • @tsbohc
    @tsbohc 7 месяцев назад +196

    Oh, so that's why Sif is like that. Might be just me, but the uncanny look of the fur actually makes Sif look almost ethereal. I bet you could use this to intentionally trigger an uncanny valley effect when designing some otherworldly creatures. Neat stuff!

    • @512TheWolf512
      @512TheWolf512 6 месяцев назад +16

      This is the actual good way to utilize phycologists in game dev, instead of using them to figure out how to further exploit people prone to gambling addiction

    • @lordanonimmo7699
      @lordanonimmo7699 5 месяцев назад +3

      In the original dark souls the gaps were more subtle,the lighting was hiding it better but in the remaster version he shows the lighting makes some parts darker wich makes the difference way more visible.

  • @LanceBerylDev
    @LanceBerylDev 7 месяцев назад +395

    Nintendo particularly has really gotten really good at shell texturing across a ton of their recent games, particularly with the rendering of fur on characters like Donkey Kong. Fun fact: Super Mario Galaxy 2 (for Nintendo Wii) was originally going to make prolific use of shell texturing for its grass; which was showcased in various early development/promotional screenshots. -However come release, nearly all shell texturing was removed from the game. Why this was done I don't believe was ever specified.. it may have well been due to performance or technical complications, ..though personally I believe the more likely answer is that the team saw the effect as too uncanny applicated in this specific instance, and jarringly dissimilar from the presentation of grass in the first game, so it was scrapped (outside of a few one-off planetoids.)

    • @myrealusername2193
      @myrealusername2193 7 месяцев назад +45

      I think they learned a lot from making nintendogs lol, fur on low power devices is hard

    • @WackoMcGoose
      @WackoMcGoose 7 месяцев назад +11

      Paper Mario TTYD used a similar method (not _procedural_ texturing, just layered textured shells) in quite a lot of areas. The flower beds in Boggly Woods, and the carpeting in the Glitz Pit Champ's Room come to mind...

    • @romajimamulo
      @romajimamulo 7 месяцев назад +16

      Adding on a prior comment, both galaxy games use shells for the bee fur.

    • @LanceBerylDev
      @LanceBerylDev 7 месяцев назад +3

      @@romajimamulo oh yeah truue

    • @WackoMcGoose
      @WackoMcGoose 7 месяцев назад

      @@romajimamulo You and Mizox are absolutely correct, just loaded up Honeyhive Galaxy in the Noclip website, and bam, that's absolutely shell-texturing right there. It was just unnoticeable in the games because the Wii is 480p. ...Really, the Galaxy games in general are a masterclass in making things look _good_ with limited hardware resources.

  • @puckchang8691
    @puckchang8691 7 месяцев назад +30

    Viva Piñata’s grass may be just a visual trick, but you can’t imagine how much I wish I could just lay down in it. It always looked so soft! You can tell me that I need to go outside and touch grass, but the only thing I really want is to touch THAT grass!

  • @Superhirn
    @Superhirn 7 месяцев назад +225

    I actually don't understand that much of what you say but it's just fun to see you magically combine values into complex lighting models (:

    • @Budder99
      @Budder99 7 месяцев назад +7

      Same

    • @StkyDkNMeBlz
      @StkyDkNMeBlz 7 месяцев назад +4

      One day

    • @missmia196
      @missmia196 6 месяцев назад +1

      I just love hearing nerds talk about topics that interest them 😂

    • @512TheWolf512
      @512TheWolf512 6 месяцев назад

      All complex things are just a collection of simple things

    • @gdog8170
      @gdog8170 6 месяцев назад

      I think one can do it by just using black values as transparent pixels

  • @MrNyagasu
    @MrNyagasu 7 месяцев назад +6

    I'm just going to take a picture of my dog, put it on a simple square mesh and call it a day.

  • @congobongoproductions5476
    @congobongoproductions5476 7 месяцев назад +15

    Can't believe no one is mentioning this bit at 19:35 saying "...what's basically a layered cake of meshes" while "Layer Cake" is playing...
    Masterfully done 👏

  • @addiment
    @addiment 7 месяцев назад +8

    > what is basically a layer cake of meshes
    > Layer Cake - Persona 5
    well done

  • @juanalbano140
    @juanalbano140 7 месяцев назад +52

    Planet Zoo has an amazing fur system too for LOTS of animals. I'm not totally sure but it also looks like shell texturing, but it looks good even on grazing angles!

  • @Gorialis
    @Gorialis 7 месяцев назад +16

    I'd like to also say about the Half Lambert solution - one of the reason it works so well is because hair is, as you say, transmissive. Real hair has light pass & refract through it, so any part of a contiguous set of hair that is in total darkness will look really weird since it's nearly impossible in most situations with a light source. Half Lambert fakes the indirect lighting you would get from a path or ray-tracing lighting model even in a forward rendering environment, so it feels more natural.

  • @nickybakes
    @nickybakes 7 месяцев назад +61

    Our game, Steel Heel Jam, has a non rotating, almost top down camera, and while watching your live streams I realized this would be a cool addition to the environment art for some grass. I plan to easily add some basic vertex animation with a noise texture for wind on the grass.

    • @snbv5real
      @snbv5real 6 месяцев назад

      I would advise you to look into raymarching grass ShaderToy instead (it look up "grass field with blades"). This technique is outdated, slow, and a pain in the ass to set up comparatively.

  • @VetNovice
    @VetNovice 7 месяцев назад +199

    Another Acerola banger? You can't be fur real!
    I've worked with fur throughout my life in 3D, seeing such clever, concise techniques here gives me an incredible basis / tool kit for this. Thanks again, king. 👑

  • @nullvoid3545
    @nullvoid3545 7 месяцев назад +92

    When I was looking into methods for making efficient imposters for voxels, I found A technique called inverse frustum mapping which inspired an idea I have yet to implement.
    So if you take A screenshot of A surface with both A regular and inverted frustum then blend them based on camera position, I think it may be possible to render the sides of depth mapped objects in ways that shells cannot because the texture isn't being mapped orthogonaly.

    • @DiThi
      @DiThi 7 месяцев назад +6

      I think a similar technique is frequently used where you just render a depth pass with flipped normals, so you have the depth of the opposite side of each mesh.

    • @haiperbus
      @haiperbus 7 месяцев назад +11

      why are you capitalizing "a"

  • @ethancory6127
    @ethancory6127 6 месяцев назад +8

    Saying average person, and then showing Jerma is a war crime

    • @pithlyx9576
      @pithlyx9576 16 дней назад +2

      Was just coming down to say the same thing

  • @DracoTheBlack
    @DracoTheBlack 6 месяцев назад +4

    Brave of you to assume that I've only watched four videos about rendering grass.

  • @_OpenJournal_
    @_OpenJournal_ 7 месяцев назад +21

    This has become one of my favorite RUclips channels. I don’t have any interest in creating games or other things that require real-time rendering techniques, but I have a deep love for video games (although I don’t really play anymore). 30 minutes of extremely well articulated, concise, funny, and entertaining explanations to technologies and concepts I knew nothing about draws me in. This is what the internet was made for: experts of their craft sharing knowledge publicly. Even if I’m not going to internalize this information so that I can create with it, it’s beautiful to learn about the foundation of how things work and it brings me happiness. Keep sharing mr. Rola! You’re inspiring!

    • @missmia196
      @missmia196 6 месяцев назад

      You verbalized why I love the Internet! Free expert knowledge everywhere!

  • @rafertysullivan6085
    @rafertysullivan6085 7 месяцев назад +49

    I know next to nothing about graphics programming but these videos are always so entertaining

  • @hughjanes4883
    @hughjanes4883 7 месяцев назад +25

    Ive ran into plenty of rendering issues with hair, it can cause some really *hairy * opacity problems. Ba dum tis

  • @morgan0
    @morgan0 7 месяцев назад +13

    17:23 another way to do this is to lerp between last frame’s value and the whatever new value by some small amount. technically it’s dependent on the frame rate so maybe do that in the physics update and then a bit of smoothing in the per frame update, or calculate it every time. the benefit of this tho is that it’s an exponential approach, which feels very natural. it’s a first order lowpass filter, and eventually i’d like to make a video going thru it in depth because it’s a really good way to smooth things and i’ve been using it a lot in my game to make things smoother, and i think more people should know about it for game use.

  • @flux1940
    @flux1940 7 месяцев назад +4

    24:43 THIS IS THE REASON why old Dark Souls bosses with fur brought my laptop always to lagging when i moved the camera close in ! Now i finally understand.
    It never made sense to me that when the camera got stuck on the groin of the taurus demon that my pc almost crashed.

  • @mileskosik472
    @mileskosik472 7 месяцев назад +13

    Not much of a gamedev person myself, but I have always wondered how shell textures work, and this video explained it super well! Great video, I would love to see how nvidia hairworks and AMD tressfx works!

  • @KoshakiDev
    @KoshakiDev 7 месяцев назад +23

    This technique reminds me of sprite stacking. A good example is NIUM.
    It is used in 2D games to simulate a 3D object without actual 3D graphics. Instead of layers being randomly generated, they contain "voxel" layers to represent a model.
    This would mean that the higher the object is, the more resource intensive it becomes.

  • @lydianlights
    @lydianlights 7 месяцев назад +14

    Another amazing video! I feel like this is one of those things that I will see EVERYWHERE now that I know to look for it.
    Very excited to participate in this challenge. Love that you're encouraging people to do homework and learn the material :3

  • @bigchooch4434
    @bigchooch4434 7 месяцев назад +23

    These videos give off huge high school project presentation vibes with all the clipart (in the best way possible) and I absolutely love it

  • @dimitribarronmore
    @dimitribarronmore 7 месяцев назад +5

    I've seen something similar to shell texturing used in 2D as a method of creating nearly-3D voxelized objects in low-resolution games. By generating vertical slices of a given object and drawing them from lowest to highest with a gradually decreasing Y value between layers, sometimes as small as a single pixel, the slices stack on top of each other and appear to build depth. This creates an effect which is something like front-on isometric perspective, because if you rotate the slices around a common origin so that every part of the image remains in the same relative location it creates an illusion of a three-dimensional object spinning but always maintaining the same 45-ish degree angle relative to the camera.

  • @Dundere_de_Duke
    @Dundere_de_Duke 7 месяцев назад +14

    Acerola, have you ever heard about particle rendered hair? I heard about the graphics of pikmin 3 a while ago and one of the bosses uses this technique to render fluffy fur from partickless that are locked to dark unseable areas of the texture. It's very interesting stuff

    • @Acerola_t
      @Acerola_t  7 месяцев назад +14

      yeah, it's a more expensive solution to the geometry problem, definitely really cool that it even works on the switch

  • @yellowpie
    @yellowpie 4 месяца назад

    I came across this video right before the final for my Intro to Modern Graphics Programming class, where I had to research a graphics programming technique and give a mini lecture on it. I only covered about half of what this video does, but it was a pretty fun experience, and while I’m more of a game designer than a programmer, I’m starting another graphics programming class today and I’m excited to learn more! Thanks for making these videos and keeping me curious about graphics programming!

  • @Levi1440p
    @Levi1440p 7 месяцев назад

    please Acerola, keep making frequent videos because I keep looking for your videos to watch, such quality 😭

  • @TheForbiddenLOL
    @TheForbiddenLOL 7 месяцев назад +6

    20:10
    >If they didn't fix it, you don't have to either!
    Perfectly said! Tech art is all about compromise lol

  • @orthodynamicstereonails
    @orthodynamicstereonails 7 месяцев назад +1

    This is the first of your videos that i could mostly understand virtually every step that we took! im actually really excited for this because you're helping me get a hang of graphics programming while i have zero programming experience, and also shows that your videos are getting better!

  • @edge4694
    @edge4694 7 месяцев назад +1

    I like the detail of having the background song being "Layer Cake" while talking about layer cakes at 19:33

  • @superbro6413
    @superbro6413 7 месяцев назад +12

    I like to imagine Acerola is a senior graphics technician at Nvidia or something and just every so often releases youtube videos on his off time haha

    • @KingBobXVI
      @KingBobXVI 7 месяцев назад +2

      He's talked about it in previous videos, he _was_ an engineer at nVidia, and left (quit or was laid off, I don't remember) not too long ago and decided to focus on youtube videos.

    • @Acerola_t
      @Acerola_t  7 месяцев назад +21

      I was a graphics programmer for Intel and PlayStation before quitting to do this full time

    • @superbro6413
      @superbro6413 7 месяцев назад +8

      @@Acerola_t Well hot diggity! That explains how you are so well versed in all of this
      Always enjoy your videos, and I appreciate that you don't shy away from the intense "formulas and calculations" side of "how do I make this look good" lol
      Thanks again for the video ✨

    • @temotskipuri3151
      @temotskipuri3151 7 месяцев назад

      Nah Nvidia wouldn't use all this el cheapo flawed stuff. I mean they're pushing realistic lighting with ray tracing, and this technique directly contradicts that, as shown in the video.

  • @Lars22
    @Lars22 7 месяцев назад +3

    It’s a bit after my bedtime but I had to watch this now ;)
    Could the rendering discussed at the end be helped by logarithmic search? So checking the mid layer first and then closing in recursively?

    • @Acerola_t
      @Acerola_t  7 месяцев назад +1

      That sounds like an interesting optimization, but you'd have to mess around with the ordering of the draw calls manually.

  • @stevethepocket
    @stevethepocket 6 месяцев назад +1

    Hey, I've been thinking about this some more lately, and I've come up with a simple way this could be further optimized: by having the number of shells vary depending on angle from the camera. The more the "strand" points toward the camera, the fewer it needs to be convincing. Though if you're planning to simulate AO, you'll still need a few at minimum to pull off that effect-and on that note, the tapering effect will also be slightly more work because you'll need to go based on distance from the solid surface rather than shell count. It also wouldn't work for most grass applications since a low camera would suddenly cause almost ALL the grass on screen to need more shells, but for something like Sif or the _Genshin Impact_ moss where it wraps around a round object, it might be ideal.

  • @RonWolfHowl
    @RonWolfHowl 6 месяцев назад

    Darn, I wish I’d had the time to do this challenge!!! I hope you do others like this in the future, I like the idea of “shader jams” where people try to improve on an existing technique. What a great thing to use your influence for!

  • @mgostIH
    @mgostIH 7 месяцев назад +12

    Regarding RNG in GPUs, what do you think about the paper "Parallel Random Numbers: As Easy as 1, 2, 3" by John K. Salmon et al., which seems to be an approach close to the hashing method you describe, but their implementation is pretty damn good statistically.

    • @Acerola_t
      @Acerola_t  7 месяцев назад +2

      I'll check it out!

    • @mgostIH
      @mgostIH 7 месяцев назад +1

      @@Acerola_t happy you've seen this comment, I know about it because in deep learning the Jax framework uses it to generate random numbers. The core idea comes from counter mode ciphers, where a seed + counter allow you to get a block of random bytes. The seed remains fixed across the generation and you only need to increase the counter over all the blocks!

  • @mochou-p
    @mochou-p 7 месяцев назад +13

    we all appreciate how long it took you to record this, you even grew clothes over time

  • @Luka9S9
    @Luka9S9 7 месяцев назад +1

    I've been looking forward to this video for a while, thank you for making a video about shell texturing Acerola, that has been a graphical technique i've aways been curious to see how it is made, It aways felt like there's not a lot of stuff that can easily get you into knowing about shell rendering, this video will be great for that, thank you once again ^^

  • @markm1514
    @markm1514 7 месяцев назад +2

    Thanks for the insightful video on fur rendering. The details about shell texturing in shaders were highly valuable, and your video's setup and pacing were spot on. I'm halfway through and I can already tell I'm going to watch it a few times. I'm excited to try this.

  • @aidennwitz
    @aidennwitz 7 месяцев назад +3

    I've always liked gaps in shell textures, I think they look neat

  • @darjanator
    @darjanator 7 месяцев назад +10

    Funny timing. Just last week CIG, the makers of Star Citizen and Squadron 42 had a panel at the annual event CitizenCon where they showed off how they're rendering hair.

    • @darjanator
      @darjanator 7 месяцев назад +3

      Are links allowed? ruclips.net/video/kLTZfAcaJpc/видео.html

  • @assiuq
    @assiuq 7 месяцев назад

    You're probably the only RUclipsr whose ads I don't skip. That cat cam is pure genius!

  • @tiagolourenco51
    @tiagolourenco51 7 месяцев назад

    QUESTION :
    I've been practicing creating shaders and custom post-processing effects in Unity. Recently, I started a project to recreate the shaders used for characters in Genshin Impact. While I feel comfortable working with shaders, I find myself getting stuck when it comes to using RTHandles, render textures, and render features in URP.
    My question is, what do you recommend for someone who is just starting out in technical art? Should I use the URP Scriptable Render Pipeline, or should I stick with the Built-In Render Pipeline and attach scripts directly to the camera for custom effects?

  • @q_druid7801
    @q_druid7801 7 месяцев назад +6

    18:54 OH MY GOD! I kept wondering how they made this short soft grass in Genshin, which I really like. Thanks for the video, now I know it

  • @Mcbuzzerr
    @Mcbuzzerr 7 месяцев назад +12

    This video and the Acerola Furry Challenge is great, I love promoting learning!

  • @JMW1906
    @JMW1906 7 месяцев назад

    Unfortunately i don't have much time in the next weeks, but here is what I'd attempt to improve rendering:
    Get rid of shells entirely and only jave a single outer shell. Then, in the fragment shader, use the incoming "ray" direction (i.e. the angle to the camera plane) and the position (UV) to know through which shell pixels the ray will travel. Then go through these, stopping when hitting the first grass and perhaps using statistics if too many shell pixels would need to be traversed, thus setting an upper bound on the shaders per pixel runtime.
    This would basically be like converting each shell pixel into a box between two shell layers.
    I imagine this being similar to a parallax shader with multiple layers. It does still have some artefacts unless the statistical guess is good. It would however eliminate the overdraw issue and may reduce the amount of artefacts when looking at it from the side. The per grass blade lighting code could then aslo be more complex, although that has other difficulties since each "ray" diesnt know about neighbor grass blades, since it is guaranteed to happen only once per fragment (each fragment will sample the random function multiple times however, but that shouldnt be as big of an issue, since it doesnt even take fommunication between Threads or bandeidth to read from a texture.
    Anyways, Im curious what we'll see in the follow up video.

    • @JMW1906
      @JMW1906 7 месяцев назад

      Edit: dynamically changing it by applying displacement would be more difficult and would have more performance overhead however, since that will require some per she'll pixel math Evaluation (or to be more precise: integration into the code for finding the next she'll pixel) as just displacing the shells would not be possible.

  • @0brn0
    @0brn0 7 месяцев назад

    Excellent as always @Acerola_t. I'm guessing there's a presentation on Z-priming / Pre-Pass techniques on the horizon to counter some of the overdraw/fill-rate costs?

  • @clonkex
    @clonkex 7 месяцев назад +3

    WTF, I never realised that's how traditional fur rendering worked!! That's so smart, and also explains the strange stepped look it always has.

  • @Roxor128
    @Roxor128 7 месяцев назад +4

    I figured out that Star Fox Adventures was using this technique back in my university days when I borrowed a friend's Gamecube for a weekend.
    Also, don't be surprised if your Furry Challenge gets a lot of entries involving characters from that franchise.

    • @stevethepocket
      @stevethepocket 7 месяцев назад

      Honestly it's amazing that this isn't more well known among that franchise's fans, or used on fan-made models. I seem to remember reading that the actual models from that game only recently finally got ripped and released to the public-and even then I've only seen them rendered without the shells or even the subtle sheen on Fox's snout-so Rare must have done a really good job obfuscating their file structure. Because it sure wasn't for lack of demand.

  • @rmt3589
    @rmt3589 7 месяцев назад +1

    That's amazing, and I plan on making this an innate tool in my engine, as I'll use it a lot! Subscribed btw.
    At the beginning of the video I was trying to figure out a solution. The one I came up with was to have basic 3d meshes, then use uv textures to make them look deeper, like hair. Either that or transparency. But this is better than either!

  • @blackasthesky
    @blackasthesky 6 месяцев назад

    I just LOVE the humor in your videos. There is so much there hidden in plain sight. And it isn't even distracting (when you aren't currently writing a comment about it).

  • @iassongionis5473
    @iassongionis5473 7 месяцев назад +3

    NEW ACEROLA BABE WAKE UP 🗣️🗣️

  • @Jomity
    @Jomity 7 месяцев назад +7

    Wouldn't it be possible to billboard the quads towards the camera? That way, there's never a gap between the layers (might ruin the narrowing though)

  • @TheSliderW
    @TheSliderW 6 месяцев назад

    Its nice to see an in depth examination oh this effect.
    The first time I've seen it was in a magazine that covered the release of shadow of the colosus on PS2. But I also noticed this effect used in Starfox Adventure on the GameCube. Another game from Rare. Pretty much all their games used this effect.
    That being said, I don't think triangles arw that big of a deal on modern hardware, you could probably get away with blades of grass using 5 vertexes and using various mesh instamcing techniques. This would give tou multiple benefits like proper shadow casting, culling and no need for expensive pixel shading or pixel transparency testing.
    You probably wouldn't be able to get the same density or long distance views but that calls for additional visual tricks too.
    Note, tou kept saying this was and still is commonly used but apart from a couple of AAA console games and Breath of the wild clones, I have mostly seen crhe classic X grass. Does anybody know of other games using this technique (outside of small indie projects )

  • @andvaribekho
    @andvaribekho 7 месяцев назад

    Fantastic video again. Thanks Acerola! I didn't know this technique and loved it. I'm definitely going to use it in my next projects. I'm wondering if overdraw is reduced if PNG8 textures are used? to avoid semi transparent alpha?

  • @emortal
    @emortal 7 месяцев назад +11

    Could you do shell rendering with billboarding? That might solve the illusion breaking at an angle. (though if big game studios haven't done it I assume this just isn't useful)

    • @stevethepocket
      @stevethepocket 7 месяцев назад +8

      Exactly my thought as well. It's such an obvious solution that there must be a serious downside. Upvoting in the hopes that people who know stuff see this and respond.

    • @ashwanishahrawat4607
      @ashwanishahrawat4607 7 месяцев назад +8

      Yeah, This is the first thought of every person who knows Billboarding,
      problem being that the Billboarding is done to a Quad or Triangle during Vertex Shader phase.
      but the shell here is made up of rasterized pixels, and Pixel itself is just a dot facing screen already.
      So doing Shell Texturing of a Quad made up of two triangles, has nothing to further Billboarding.

  • @kayasia8916
    @kayasia8916 7 месяцев назад

    Great video! Randomly found this vod while bored and surfing, I really enjoyed all of it!

  • @mantacid1221
    @mantacid1221 7 месяцев назад +2

    What if you project the texture of the layer above from the camera position onto the layer below to create an occlusion mask? Would that prevent overdraw?

  • @cynthius6567
    @cynthius6567 7 месяцев назад +2

    I've always been fascinated with how good Fox's fur looked in Star Fox Adventures, considering it was running on the Gamecube. Such a simple trick, but it works wonders, and I think the part that impresses me most is not just how impressive the fur and its "physics" looked, but how well it smoothed out Fox's model and made him look higher fidelity than anything you'd see in other games of the era simply because the fur hid the hard edges of the polygons he was made of.

  • @parmesanzero7678
    @parmesanzero7678 5 месяцев назад

    Your explanations are so thorough and have just enough balance of the technical and non-technical to be interesting and educational even to those with no expertise. You’re an excellent teacher.

  • @Sylkis89
    @Sylkis89 7 месяцев назад

    I wonder how to make photorealistic mohair/suri alpaca/dual fleece wool/longwol/etc. sweaters, very fluffy but with still distinctly visible structure of the knit that will form various complex patterns, and also how it behaves on a body depending on how tight or loose, the body type, the position the person is taking - how the knit will fold or stretch in different places, and also how the fluffy halo will interact with the lighting, etc... especially if animated, how to make it realistic. Also how to account for the varying thickness of the knit on the body and so on. There's just so much to consider and it seems so difficult and also that usual tricks used for hair will help, but will not cover all bases...

  • @KitsuneFaroe
    @KitsuneFaroe 7 месяцев назад +1

    Literally one thing I have been thinking on how to aproach a lot lately was the exact topic of this video. Amazing! Also your contenta is always top notch very instructivo and really inspiring! I love you teach the beatifulness and technicalities of visuals!

  • @KaiHydra
    @KaiHydra 7 месяцев назад +2

    I wonder if this can be used for generating foilage using generated meshes, this is something i really have wanted to do because I hate the idea of creating individual objects/prefabs for bushes/hedges

  • @Ebbie155
    @Ebbie155 5 месяцев назад

    Just found this channel but can say I’m not disappointed I always wanted to get into game design and all that and don’t really plan to now but it’s nice to see what’s going on behind the scenes and what coding is used

  • @Xaymar
    @Xaymar 7 месяцев назад +2

    AFAIK, there is one way to "fix" the gap between shells by slightly turning the surface towards the camera in the vertex shader. This allows a camera to be parallel to the shell planes, but the math is so complex i never got it to work right.
    A different technique that i also know of is parallax hair/grass, but that requires an unholy amount of preprocessing so that you can render curves in depth.

  • @Big.Joe.Grizzly
    @Big.Joe.Grizzly 6 месяцев назад

    Nice video man ur a clever dude lol you should do a video about reflections in games. Like window reflections, glass, water, floors etc etc.. it's quite interesting to see all the different ways games achieve reflections. My fav example is in MGS1 for ps1 where puddles on the floor are actually just holes in the geometry with a replica map underneath flipped upside down. Such a simple way to do it but it's so effective especially for the time

  • @DracoGalboy
    @DracoGalboy 7 месяцев назад +2

    Very nice job with your own shell layering

  • @dowairu
    @dowairu 6 месяцев назад

    This is amazing! I'm just learning about shader programming and finding your videos super interesting. Is there any chance this can be done in Shadertoy? I'm assuming it might be easier with Unity because you can control parameters in the engine?

  • @TimRobertsSound
    @TimRobertsSound 7 месяцев назад

    Great video. Good to see you adding shells (shirts) as you go.

  • @toonlien4589
    @toonlien4589 7 месяцев назад

    19:33 clever choice of music

  • @giobrando6574
    @giobrando6574 7 месяцев назад

    the cat video on the ad segment is pure genius ngl I sat through all that

  • @vibaj16
    @vibaj16 7 месяцев назад +2

    What if you slightly offset the angle of each shell (with some funky math to fix the positions of strands for each shell) to try to fix the effect breaking down when you look at the side?

    • @tiarkrezar
      @tiarkrezar 7 месяцев назад

      I wonder if just adding a slight amount of randomness to the height of each vertex as you extrude them would make the effect look wonky. You could probably fill a lot of the gaps that way though.

  • @the_woodman
    @the_woodman 7 месяцев назад

    SICK video I legit look forward to every one dude, thank you for sharing your knowledge in a really entertaining format, it legit helps with figuring this stuff out. also cat distraction during ad is actually insane psychological manipulation and works really well I genuinely didn't even realise I was listening to an ad 🙉

  • @kaasronald3623
    @kaasronald3623 7 месяцев назад

    been subbed for over a year and it's really nice to see your numbers thrive now. fully deserved. great video as always

  • @miketheburns
    @miketheburns 7 месяцев назад +1

    it took me until 22:18 to realize you were layering your shirts throughout the video. Mad props.

  • @dreamerchrysalis
    @dreamerchrysalis 7 месяцев назад

    Seriously having the JUNES theme for your ad is just perfect.
    Oh and the video was very fun to watch too ;)

  • @karl6980
    @karl6980 7 месяцев назад

    I remember trying out using kuwahara filtering in conjunction with shell texturing for grass once, and I remember it looking kind of interesting. Definitely hid the gaps between shells quite a bit

  • @shadowdemonaer
    @shadowdemonaer 7 месяцев назад +1

    2:28 generally there would just be a ton of instancing going on for grass and other repeating objects.
    Instancing is taking and object and duplicating it in such a way that the program acts like there is no extra faces on screen to compute. For example, a cube has 6 sides, and when you duplicate normally you would then have 12 faces to compute, but with instancing you still only have 6. so you can do that with millions of grass blades and have really nice optimization.
    I'm further in now and really fascinated by how these ideas came to be. Can't wait to see how physics works.
    Dude I had no idea Genshin did it too. I'm probably going to unfortunately have to figure this out myself.

  • @Fuzzietomato1
    @Fuzzietomato1 7 месяцев назад

    Your videos are so interesting and well edited!

  • @KingBobXVI
    @KingBobXVI 7 месяцев назад +2

    Waiting the whole video to see if you'd mention Shadow of the Colossus, and it being mentioned at 25:49... RIP in pepperonis, sweet prince.
    Definitely one of the best looking uses of shell texturing for large creatures, imo, and done with very little processing power at its disposal.

  • @held2053
    @held2053 7 месяцев назад +1

    Tbh, I almost forgot, that the video was about hair, when he talked about the grass field
    I was invested in it

  • @mudassar14love
    @mudassar14love 6 месяцев назад +1

    I'm so glad I found this channel. Now I know what's really going on with hair and fur in games. Also now I understand how shell texturing is used in Biomutant; I was wondering why characters fur looks weird on certain angles. Great stuff 👍

  • @theorybox3094
    @theorybox3094 6 месяцев назад +1

    Putting a video of your pet during the length of the sponsorship might be the most brilliant move i've ever seen on youtube

  • @user-tw2kr6hg4r
    @user-tw2kr6hg4r 7 месяцев назад +2

    You should probably use acceleration instead of velocity to calculate the displacement or ideally a blend of both after applying a low-pass IIR filter.

  • @kellerwhite9299
    @kellerwhite9299 7 месяцев назад

    I would just like to say I appreciated the bit about adding clothing layers (or shells, if you will) throughout the video.
    That is all, thank you for the quality video and have a nice day. :)

  • @krisvers
    @krisvers 6 месяцев назад +1

    I've been a fan of your content for a while and I enjoy these types of videos (deep diving into a rendering topic and discussing optimizations) like the grass rendering series. I think it would be very interesting to take a similar look at rendering real-time snow with deformations like RDR2 (Red Dead Redemption 2) does.

  • @EpicGamer63637
    @EpicGamer63637 7 месяцев назад +2

    Thank you, i have always wanted to learn these kind of things, I am going to give this a try myself and learn something new 🙂

  • @JKTCGMV13
    @JKTCGMV13 6 месяцев назад

    I love that you ended with a challenge and I love how you presented it

  • @DarkSwordsman
    @DarkSwordsman 7 месяцев назад +1

    Your videos are priceless. Not only did you answer my question of how people do the funny furry carpets in VRChat, but you provided an easy to understand concept for hashing (which I was struggling with for a game I made) and also made me understand better how to manipulate textures in UV space. I can not believe these are not paid courses. You are amazing.

  • @TrueKinth
    @TrueKinth 6 месяцев назад +1

    Great video. A potentially interesting idea for a future video is to look at how hair is done for humans, which is usually via the hair cards technique.

  • @okunamayanad
    @okunamayanad 7 месяцев назад

    i remember watching the stream it was at 17:25 :D idk how acerola always does this but every video of him is interesting

  • @LinuxBacon
    @LinuxBacon 7 месяцев назад

    Thanks for adorable cat clips during the sponsor spot

  • @kaneymon
    @kaneymon 7 месяцев назад

    Another brilliant addition to the acerola grass playlist, thank you. More please.

  • @Lunnauna
    @Lunnauna 7 месяцев назад +1

    I have been trying to understand fur in Unity for weeks, and now you, kind sir, have provided me with all the answers. Thank you very much

  • @EdenNeedsAYoutubeHandle
    @EdenNeedsAYoutubeHandle 7 месяцев назад +1

    Shadow of the Colossus was what made me interested in shell texturing long before I even knew there was a name for it. Makes sense that they'd want to draw your eye to it, since fur patches are key to climbing the colossi and all that. It blew me away in 2005 and it still holds up today.