not sure if anyone gives a damn but if you are bored like me during the covid times you can stream all the latest series on instaflixxer. Have been streaming with my girlfriend lately xD
There is documents about raytracing on the internet since more than 20 years now... Raytracing isnt new and its your fault if you didnt looked it up...
@@TheRazrsharp16 I'm the one who liked your comment. Maybe its the fact that english isnt my native language and it made me sound more rude than I was. I'm sorry if I hurt you. But I cannot understand your first comment. Why havent you looked it up on the internet when you realised you didnt knew what it was? is it your fault? or my fault because im an asshole?
@@pascha4527 I think I understand the confusion here. Razr was saying that people spoke as though everyone knows and understands Ray Tracing like they were some sort of gaming geniuses when in reality people are just blowing hot air. The video is, as such, one of the only videos with someone explaining what the hell it is instead of farting the term out just to sound smarter.
A mirror physically reflects light. Our eyes do but only enough to translate information about the absorbed light, so it's like the difference between writing/reading a word compared to speaking a word.
Sammmme i mean i thought this video was really interesting but.... its not the same and not the reason i subbed even tho i still plan on staying subscribed.
Zach and Evan producing some cool, insightful content on the gaming world. I love this! Makes me appreciate the work that goes into all the games (especially from IOI).
Pretty accurate, good video! Only thing is that planar reflections don't mirror player inputs, it's just a technique which renders the scene again from the mirror's perspective. Mirroring the room with player inputs is just another (really old) technique.
Yeah that really irked me too. Mario64 mirror = Duplicate geo behind a transparent wall. Hitman planar-reflection mirror = second camera rendering the scene from the reverse angle and mapping it onto a surface’s texture. Also SSR isnt just calculating based on the immediate vicinity, but is hard limiting to reusing the already rendered pixels on screen, and figuring out how to remap those onto other surfaces
technically planar reflections aren't just duplicates of the environment, they're still rendering the game twice from different perspectives. As long as the area with the planar reflection is well optimised, you can get away with a really decent amount of quality. The main downside with screen space reflections is that it's well, screen space. So the game can only render whats visible on the screen in the reflection. So if anything is obscured, like the face of a character or part of an object, it can't be shown in the reflection. It's also why screen space reflections break down when you stare directly at them.
3:45 it's interesting that bloom is applied to the main texture but not the ray traced texture, I guess the ray traced image doesn't read the emissive data from the original object?
Ray Tracing accounts to not only reflections, but to...everything like shadows, ambient occlusion, glow and bounce light, ambient light, everything. Many people think it's only about some fancy reflections on glossy surfaces, but that's because the first few games implementing it used ONLY this aspect of it, while games like Cyberpunk 2077 have MANY ray traced components. Just watch the scene from the start of the game with Dexter DeShawn in the car with and without RT and you will see. It's the future of game graphics.
Love this series. This is stuff I thought I understood but turns out I didn't! and it seems crazy now but making that distinction between animated movies and videos games put a lot into perspective.
screenspace reflections also are unable to reflect surfaces that are out of view or not viewed at all. for example if you see a puddle in the floor or go to an ocean and look at the bottom of a vehicle or bridge it will not render correctly, another example is trying to get a reflection with moving objects in it when looking at reflective windows on buildings
Software ray tracing in some UE5 games (Called Software Lumen) is shockingly good relative to the performance cost, and apparently Alan Wake 2 also uses its own version of software ray tracing for some of the lighting effects even when "ray tracing" is disabled in the settings menu.
i think ray tracing will allow future developers to be lazy and make games without hand placing all the lighting, reflections and baked in shadows as the customer's GPU will render it in real time for them.
Really does justice to Ray Tracing and its actually massive impact on gaming. A lot of the times when people think of Ray Tracing these days, it's often considered as a thing for hardcore gamers or a simple unnecessary joke-ish addition as in used in Minecraft. Will definitely recommend this video for anyone interested in the topic.
to be really honest, i'd take a very well stylized non-raytraced art style that has elements of realism in it, than one that is 100% photorealistic with 100% correct mirrors and reflections
How funny. The reason I looked up "how videogame mirrors work" is because I was playing HITMAN and had to stare in a mirror while I waited for a target to go to a bathroom for me to strangle them.
I enjoy this straightforward, informative content much more than the vapid Anthem or Cyberpunk pile-ons that filled up the scheduled before IG downsized.
1:00 Oh, you mean what Quake 3 and Unreal Tournament accomplished back in 1999? You're telling us that cameras are difficult to pull off what was done over 20 years ago? Dude, Duke Nukem Forever did it and that was a game that was reviewed with "dated graphics"... :/ A small section (IE a bathroom mirror) should not be THAT taxing of a graphics processor or $400+ video card if we're already playing visually pleasing games like Resident Evil 2 or Doom (2016 or Eternal, take your pick), especially if Q3 and UT did this back in '99. -Mad Wolf
These videos are like crack. If "How it's Made" had a baby with Inside Gaming. Can't get enough. As a technician and certified nerd, it's frustrating to see how little the general populace understand when it comes to the tech they use and consume daily. I mean, ray tracing is a bit closer to thermodynamics than how wifi works, but you get my point.
Real-time ray tracing is very impressive at 60 frames per second, instead of 60 frames per... week. Makes me wonder if we’re gonna see live performance actors and see buzz lightyear move in real time, and be able to answer questions from the audience
This isn't quite correct. While all these techniques are used together to create realism they don't quite function like you said. Games that only render what you see use occlusion culling. Essentially the engine calculates data and can use it to hide objects outside the cameras view. That's why in some games you might have noticed that things are missing right at the edge of the screen, when you turn you camera quickly. I experienced this in Gears 5. In old games you couldn't calculate reflections well, so you had to use a single texture to calculate them from, instead of cubemaps. And for mirrors you had to model the whole scene inverted and also have a duplicate character. but the cuplicate character is not what is used in hitman 3 for example. That was scrapped a while ago. The mirrors we see now are either planar reflections like you said. But characters are included in planet reflections, so there's no duplicate character anymore. Similar to this, mirrors can also be textures rendering another camera view, wich mirrors your gameplay camera position and rotation relative to you mirror object. It's sort of the same technique as portal uses for its portals, and probably technically similar to how planet reflections work. And while cubemaps work like you said, you forgot to mention box projection, wich distorts the image depending on where the reflective object is. This is often used in racing games. But when the cars go through the track the reflection distorts, but they can't used the same cube map forever. They blend between multiple different cubemaps when they enter different zones. The size of these zones are also what is used to distort the maps using box projection. And the zones are boxes, so that's where the name comes from. You mention ray tracing, wich is new technology and simulates a lot of rays from the camera, but you explain it like screen space reflections actually work, wich is a whole other thing. You explain screen space reflections as well, but not how they actually function. Screen space reflection is an effect wich can only reflect things that are actually in view of the camera. It doesn't just "sample its immidiate arean" like you said. So if half a building is in view, but it's whole reflection should be visible, then only half of the reflection will be visible, and the rest will be cut off. That's why the elavator door you showed actually just fades away. They chose to make it fade before cutting off. And ill give you credit, this effect is often mixed with cube maps, like in mirrors edge catalyst for example. It's more subtle, like you said.
theres a scene in bonelab where under a mirror is a warning "what you see in the mirror is not your reflection it is a sperete unkowable void entity under no circumstance should you break the glass" Now i understand what the meta joke was after the first part of this vid. however in bonelab its also littral your reflection IS a creature pretending you be you :p
WRONG. Mirrors are simply an additional viewing plane, just like the plane that you look at as you play the game. They don't use ray-tracing (not in the way we currently use that term, anyway), they aren't particularly resource-intensive, and once you can render a video game, rendering a mirror is not a technological feat.
What's important to note is that ray tracing shouldn't be (the only thing) used for functional mirrors, but rather mostly used for effects/ambient mirrors. This is because you want your game to be able to run on the most potato hardware possible, without having to completely remove a feature.
Why does the s Spiderman footage have real reflections of the surrounding buildings? Is that a feature exclusive to the PS5? On PS4 there are pretty convincing reflections, but if you look closely they don't actually match the surrounding buildings. They're just random buildings.
What's cool about the mirrors in Hitman is that npcs can actually spot you approaching them through the mirror and act accordingly
Inside Gaming giving us some Inside KNOWLEDGE
KNAWLEDGE
INSIGHT GAMING
The are in the know
Inside the Know?
not sure if anyone gives a damn but if you are bored like me during the covid times you can stream all the latest series on instaflixxer. Have been streaming with my girlfriend lately xD
Still look forward to this each week. Thanks you guys. I'm still holding on to anything IG that I can!
Thanks for that.
Finally, after a year of everyone talking about ray tracing as if the whole world already knows what it is, someone explains it. Bless you, Snackary.
There is documents about raytracing on the internet since more than 20 years now... Raytracing isnt new and its your fault if you didnt looked it up...
@@pascha4527 next time you go to write a comment, ask yourself, "Is this something an asshole would say?" If it is, don't write that thing.
@@TheRazrsharp16 I'm the one who liked your comment. Maybe its the fact that english isnt my native language and it made me sound more rude than I was. I'm sorry if I hurt you.
But I cannot understand your first comment. Why havent you looked it up on the internet when you realised you didnt knew what it was? is it your fault? or my fault because im an asshole?
@@pascha4527 I think I understand the confusion here. Razr was saying that people spoke as though everyone knows and understands Ray Tracing like they were some sort of gaming geniuses when in reality people are just blowing hot air. The video is, as such, one of the only videos with someone explaining what the hell it is instead of farting the term out just to sound smarter.
But how can mirrors be real if our eyes aren’t real?
Great job with the new format, y’all!
This is where the "mind blown" meme would go, if GIFs were supported in the comments.
@@BoondockSaintRyan Link it.
A mirror physically reflects light. Our eyes do but only enough to translate information about the absorbed light, so it's like the difference between writing/reading a word compared to speaking a word.
Man, I miss the dailies already
Sammmme i mean i thought this video was really interesting but.... its not the same and not the reason i subbed even tho i still plan on staying subscribed.
Atleast there’s still weekly roundup.
Really appreciate the explanation. Liking and commenting for the algorithm.
all hail the algo!
I wonder how long until the word algorithm has a negative effect on the success of a video
Zach and Evan producing some cool, insightful content on the gaming world. I love this! Makes me appreciate the work that goes into all the games (especially from IOI).
Pretty accurate, good video! Only thing is that planar reflections don't mirror player inputs, it's just a technique which renders the scene again from the mirror's perspective. Mirroring the room with player inputs is just another (really old) technique.
Yeah that really irked me too. Mario64 mirror = Duplicate geo behind a transparent wall. Hitman planar-reflection mirror = second camera rendering the scene from the reverse angle and mapping it onto a surface’s texture.
Also SSR isnt just calculating based on the immediate vicinity, but is hard limiting to reusing the already rendered pixels on screen, and figuring out how to remap those onto other surfaces
Thank you. I felt like I was going crazy when he accurately defined first before throwing in that incorrect information.
Mirror:
Duke: Damn, I`m looking good!
Great job! I normally don’t like/favorite videos from this channel but I’m doing this because you deserve it
I love these kind of videos, and I'm glad this channel isn't completely dead.
Zach is truly feeding us knowledge ☺️👏🏼 thank you king
nice to have someone actually explain this in a concise way
Loving this unofficial series yo
This is much better than the previous format. Keep up the good work!!
Oh hey, I love seeing videos like this one, interesting and informative!
I'm really enjoying these types of videos from IG
Inside gaming lives yay. Still miss the dailys the latest info in the gaming world with sharp and witty banter. Can not wait for next vid
Heck yeah!!! These tidbits are awesome, keep em up
Really like this new series of educational videos! Keep it up
I really love this new format yall are doing, keep it up!
technically planar reflections aren't just duplicates of the environment, they're still rendering the game twice from different perspectives. As long as the area with the planar reflection is well optimised, you can get away with a really decent amount of quality.
The main downside with screen space reflections is that it's well, screen space. So the game can only render whats visible on the screen in the reflection. So if anything is obscured, like the face of a character or part of an object, it can't be shown in the reflection. It's also why screen space reflections break down when you stare directly at them.
So informative! Love these random dollops of information you are giving us! Thank you!
Great vid: must have been a lot of work to explain these somewhat complex ideas so simply. Thank you!
Very well done and informative from history to current tech. I like it.
Love these videos. I'd rather this than daily uploads, ten fold
Lol the Spider-Man puddle controversy
hahaha
Why was there even a controversy? “Oh no! The puddles aren’t exactly the way they should be! Time to get all nitpicky!”
Man, had a small understanding of raytracing but good to know what exactly it did and does.
I like these types of videos, I've heard "ray tracing" thrown around for a while and never really understood the hype.
DIGITAL FOUNDRY showed that gamers really like this type of content.
I thought ray tracing was trying to follow brownman's career after he left rooster teeth
This stuff is fascinating. Keep it up!
Thank you for this! This was pure Edutainment 🤩
I’d love a more technical explanation, but this was pretty good
That 5 min informative sweet spot. Great
Wish they worked in Cyberpunk 2077 but I still love it
3:45 it's interesting that bloom is applied to the main texture but not the ray traced texture, I guess the ray traced image doesn't read the emissive data from the original object?
Well done. Keep up the good work!
Ray Tracing accounts to not only reflections, but to...everything like shadows, ambient occlusion, glow and bounce light, ambient light, everything. Many people think it's only about some fancy reflections on glossy surfaces, but that's because the first few games implementing it used ONLY this aspect of it, while games like Cyberpunk 2077 have MANY ray traced components. Just watch the scene from the start of the game with Dexter DeShawn in the car with and without RT and you will see. It's the future of game graphics.
Love this series. This is stuff I thought I understood but turns out I didn't! and it seems crazy now but making that distinction between animated movies and videos games put a lot into perspective.
great video Zach!
screenspace reflections also are unable to reflect surfaces that are out of view or not viewed at all. for example if you see a puddle in the floor or go to an ocean and look at the bottom of a vehicle or bridge it will not render correctly, another example is trying to get a reflection with moving objects in it when looking at reflective windows on buildings
Software ray tracing in some UE5 games (Called Software Lumen) is shockingly good relative to the performance cost, and apparently Alan Wake 2 also uses its own version of software ray tracing for some of the lighting effects even when "ray tracing" is disabled in the settings menu.
Thanks for the info/lecture.
Cool! I'm down for more 👍
I love this series
i think ray tracing will allow future developers to be lazy and make games without hand placing all the lighting, reflections and baked in shadows as the customer's GPU will render it in real time for them.
I saw that lazynes in the new RE4 and Hogwarts legacy. There are zero mirror reflections without RT
As someone who’s trying to get into game development this is very informative
Really does justice to Ray Tracing and its actually massive impact on gaming. A lot of the times when people think of Ray Tracing these days, it's often considered as a thing for hardcore gamers or a simple unnecessary joke-ish addition as in used in Minecraft. Will definitely recommend this video for anyone interested in the topic.
Who knew making a working mirror in game would be so complicated 🤯🤯
This is like Quick Bits w/ gaming.
Hey guys BF2042 has a setting called raytracedscreenspace reflections. Is that a hybrid of raytracing and SSR?
4:44 hey that blocky game
What is that game with the Hot Air Ballon reflection? Of the guy climbing the building with a black suit and helmet, and what I assume is a parachute?
Interesting content, keep it up!
Educational films? I love this.
Ranting about Gamestop only goes so far.
Really enjoy this series, reminds me of Donut Media and Because Science. Fun to learn some of the more behind the scenes tech in games.
Im just glad the entire team was not just, let go entirely. If you have have links of the rest of the former team’s members, pls post them.
Literally first video to explain why Ray tracing matters.
2:43 ROBLOX just layers ssr on top of cube map
Honestly nice to know
Here for the content, comment for the algorithm
Where did they all go and why arent they posting vids?
I like this direction
More please!!
to be really honest, i'd take a very well stylized non-raytraced art style that has elements of realism in it, than one that is 100% photorealistic with 100% correct mirrors and reflections
Yeah, Cyberpunk 2076 has “push the button and wait for 3s to see your mirror reflection”, its awsome, future is here.
How funny. The reason I looked up "how videogame mirrors work" is because I was playing HITMAN and had to stare in a mirror while I waited for a target to go to a bathroom for me to strangle them.
Dope video!
Now we need a video on why CP2077 mirrors are so terrible when Hitman did it fine
Cool video, interesting to learn about what RTX actually does instead of it being a buzzword (at least for me)
This was awesome
I enjoy this straightforward, informative content much more than the vapid Anthem or Cyberpunk pile-ons that filled up the scheduled before IG downsized.
God, I miss this channel
Are y’all still doing the podcast?
the wet surfaces that behave like clear mirrors is not exactly realistic
Wait so what happened to the daily crew?
See I never understood what Ray tracing was so this video was very good for someone like me lol
Thank You
Hey I like this new direction. Actually INSIDE gaming
In cyberpunk 2077, the mirrors no longer work cause technology is so advanced
Thanks Inside Gaming (:
So ray tracing calculates the path of each virtual photon and simulates it?
I LOOOOVE THE NEW SERIES 🙏🔥🙏
Well done
1:00 Oh, you mean what Quake 3 and Unreal Tournament accomplished back in 1999? You're telling us that cameras are difficult to pull off what was done over 20 years ago? Dude, Duke Nukem Forever did it and that was a game that was reviewed with "dated graphics"... :/ A small section (IE a bathroom mirror) should not be THAT taxing of a graphics processor or $400+ video card if we're already playing visually pleasing games like Resident Evil 2 or Doom (2016 or Eternal, take your pick), especially if Q3 and UT did this back in '99.
-Mad Wolf
These videos are like crack. If "How it's Made" had a baby with Inside Gaming. Can't get enough. As a technician and certified nerd, it's frustrating to see how little the general populace understand when it comes to the tech they use and consume daily. I mean, ray tracing is a bit closer to thermodynamics than how wifi works, but you get my point.
Why don't most recent games do this then? Like in Alan Wake 2, you don't get a mirror unless you use ray tracing
Oh thank god an IG video
Great video
0:48 what game is this? Looks gorgeous
Hitman III.
Real-time ray tracing is very impressive at 60 frames per second, instead of 60 frames per... week. Makes me wonder if we’re gonna see live performance actors and see buzz lightyear move in real time, and be able to answer questions from the audience
This isn't quite correct. While all these techniques are used together to create realism they don't quite function like you said. Games that only render what you see use occlusion culling. Essentially the engine calculates data and can use it to hide objects outside the cameras view. That's why in some games you might have noticed that things are missing right at the edge of the screen, when you turn you camera quickly. I experienced this in Gears 5.
In old games you couldn't calculate reflections well, so you had to use a single texture to calculate them from, instead of cubemaps. And for mirrors you had to model the whole scene inverted and also have a duplicate character. but the cuplicate character is not what is used in hitman 3 for example. That was scrapped a while ago. The mirrors we see now are either planar reflections like you said. But characters are included in planet reflections, so there's no duplicate character anymore. Similar to this, mirrors can also be textures rendering another camera view, wich mirrors your gameplay camera position and rotation relative to you mirror object. It's sort of the same technique as portal uses for its portals, and probably technically similar to how planet reflections work.
And while cubemaps work like you said, you forgot to mention box projection, wich distorts the image depending on where the reflective object is. This is often used in racing games. But when the cars go through the track the reflection distorts, but they can't used the same cube map forever. They blend between multiple different cubemaps when they enter different zones. The size of these zones are also what is used to distort the maps using box projection. And the zones are boxes, so that's where the name comes from.
You mention ray tracing, wich is new technology and simulates a lot of rays from the camera, but you explain it like screen space reflections actually work, wich is a whole other thing. You explain screen space reflections as well, but not how they actually function. Screen space reflection is an effect wich can only reflect things that are actually in view of the camera. It doesn't just "sample its immidiate arean" like you said. So if half a building is in view, but it's whole reflection should be visible, then only half of the reflection will be visible, and the rest will be cut off. That's why the elavator door you showed actually just fades away. They chose to make it fade before cutting off. And ill give you credit, this effect is often mixed with cube maps, like in mirrors edge catalyst for example. It's more subtle, like you said.
Jheeze, 10 second unskippable ad? That’s low Google.
theres a scene in bonelab where under a mirror is a warning "what you see in the mirror is not your reflection it is a sperete unkowable void entity under no circumstance should you break the glass" Now i understand what the meta joke was after the first part of this vid. however in bonelab its also littral your reflection IS a creature pretending you be you :p
Yes, yes, very informative....Now bring back the dailies!!!!
WRONG. Mirrors are simply an additional viewing plane, just like the plane that you look at as you play the game. They don't use ray-tracing (not in the way we currently use that term, anyway), they aren't particularly resource-intensive, and once you can render a video game, rendering a mirror is not a technological feat.
What's important to note is that ray tracing shouldn't be (the only thing) used for functional mirrors, but rather mostly used for effects/ambient mirrors.
This is because you want your game to be able to run on the most potato hardware possible, without having to completely remove a feature.
Why does the s
Spiderman footage have real reflections of the surrounding buildings? Is that a feature exclusive to the PS5? On PS4 there are pretty convincing reflections, but if you look closely they don't actually match the surrounding buildings. They're just random buildings.