Parallax mapping is also how RDR2’s landscape textures look very detailed at times. All the little rocks, dirt, paths look like they’re tessellated but a closer look at them reveals it’s parallaxed
0:33 i just love how the interior changes in a split second when the protagonist crawls around the corner. Suddenly, a kitchen area turns into a dining area with a door on the left that leads you out of the building on the 30th floor.
Those must be the emergency exits. There were plans to put in a fire escape, but they ran out of money and figured just the doors would be good enough.
Yeah, the problem is the window. You cannot fake that with textures. One possibility would be to use real rooms for the corners of a building, but that is expensive.
Indeed a limitation of the technique, but I’d argue the profits (greatly) outweigh the expense. Also, this could be used to great effect in another game to be purposefully ‘trippy’.
A common problem with parallax mapping on surfaces that characters stand on is that it makes the player look like they are floating above the ground, as is seen when turning around in Genshin impact.
I'm not well versed in 3D but couldn't they have used normal maps instead of displacement maps? Normals may not be the best for low end devices but it could be visually better. But then again it's a game and not really a render piece.
@@user-oo7dw4qw4b both normal maps and displacement maps are used, the difference is that a normal map tells how a surface interacts with light, while a displacement map is more about what parts of the surface the player can see (the whole "fake depth" bit from the video). To get the best kind of results you want to use both since they provide information on different aspects of a material
That does look really cool ! I think that the extra bit is distorted, if you look really closely, because they are pushing the technique quite far. It's like the original problem of textures with depth looking too flat, but they've buried the problem one level of illusion deeper than normal. My brain didn't even notice the distortion, first and second time around.
Really interesting. Thinking about how older games handle this, it's usually that every window has glare on it / reflects the sky. I never thought of this as overcoming the limitation of not needing to draw every single window, but it's actually a really elegant solution. It's fine from a distance. parallaxing seems to be the next step up. Easter egg should be one room you can actually interact with :D
@@twodollarking8009 I'm not sure when they were first used but I'm specifically remembering games like battlefield 2142, NFS and James bond games on gamecube.
@@twodollarking8009 they don't use this for windows (as most buildings can be entered/destroyed) but in Crysis they used Parallax Occlusion Mapping pretty heavily. They even went an extra step above and made the parallax textures self-shadow... And that game came out in 2007.
1:50 Personally my favorite part of the video. Right here is genuinely some of the best insight on game development I've seen, you break things down so well.
It amazes me how creativity has developed solutions in every restrictions 👍 You got 2D? No problem, use parallax like Super Mario You got restricted polygon in PS1? No problem, use fog to ease the render process like Silent Hill You got full city map? No problem, use cube map to make those windows looks alive
Don't get confused by Parallax and Tessellation *1.* Parallax is a 2D Fake 3D to fool your eyes, it's the old tech used first in FEAR Game back in 2005 on PC, and it was supported by DirectX 8 & 9, DirectX 9 has higher depth and improvement over DirectX 8 *2.* Tessellation is a Fake 3D Cover of the lower polygons, which makes it completely High polygons, that you can't see a single square or visible polygon, it was used first in DirectX 11 Games Like S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Call of Pripyat on Characters model
Yeah I always loved those deep POM bullet impacts in FEAR. Perfect Dark Zero on the X360 had some really nice POM brick textures too. Crysis 2 with its DX11 update also had some great textures with it. Really cool tool/trick in games.
Serious Sam: The First Encounter used tesselation in 2001, specifically the ATI-developed TruForm technology. Sadly it didn't catch on. You got me interested which the earliest parallax title was, if it was available as early as DX8.
@@WTFBOOMDOOM I played the Serious Sam: The First Encounter it doesn't have tesselation, also i sreach on CZcams i didn't find one, will you show me proof a video or gameplay photo please
@@FantasyNero Search for Serious Sam TruForm here on CZcams, there are some videos. The game came out in early 2001, the technology appeared in August; it was introduced to Serious Sam in patch 1.06 from December '01. According to Wikipedia it only supported new Radeon cards (makes sense because video cards aged very fast back then). It was later introduced to the Terascale architecture in 2007.
ok good, I was expecting this to be a stupid technicality of "one polygon" meaning "one type of polygon", explaining how 3d objects are (usually) made up of all triangles
Devs could've just made the windows reflective so we won't see the interior that's why I appreciate them doing this to make the world a bit more immersive
I was hoping you would have said "crysis" and not genshin impact as an example... "crysis" was one of the first games to use parrallax occlusion mapping and it was so advanced that it blew everyones mind how mud tracks and rocks are 3D and realistic.
@@Rossilaz58 yeah i mean it is cool with the art style and modern take on the cell shading but i mean come on it doesn't use any new cutting edge tech. All of that existed way before genshin and the games which used it the most intensively and perfectly should be showcased... or mentioned. I'd like to hear about other games not just genshin how it does something xD
@@sermerlin1 yeahhh the genshin shilling is a little worrying, at least from someone who’s never played it (I mean, it looks like an overly produced predatory mobile game from the outside looking it, but I’ve been wrong before 🤷♂️) but if you ignore that these videos are actually really informative so I watch em lol
@@maninblack3410 In the past he's described Genshin Impact as the prettiest game he has ever played. I'm inclined to agree. It's a truly breathtaking game Damn shame that nobody else in the AAA scene seems to be interested in making a proper standalone game with the same anime-inspired art style
"not genshin".. Mentioning genshin and using it as an exemple in this video is valid and poses no problem. This channel isn't about game dev history, and showing who did it the first or the best isn't the goal here either. Genshin is relevant here because it is popular now, more than crysis is today, and the creator seems to enjoy it too. Sure, that 15 year old game that isnt a pionner in that particular tech might have used it very well too, but you're just using it as an excuse, trying to invalidate genshin because you don't like that game you never played
Parallax mapping is a trip! I remember being amazed at the technique being used in Oblivion, and Parallax Occlusion mapping in Crysis, back in 2008. Never could I imagine it being used to simulate interior rooms in entire skyscrapers.
It's amazing to think about how these little rooms, in what is considered a graphically amazing game today, will , in the next ten years, be considered old-school. Like , my kid in the not far off year of 2030 playing the game "Wow, the rooms weren't even 3D, they were just flat textures. I can't believe people thought these were good graphics."
i think itll be more along the lines of how we look at optimizations in older games today, especially the old pokemon games. its less of "wow they really couldnt even afford to use a bit more data on the textures?" and more along the lines of "look what they were able to do with the technology of the time"
dont realy except that big change in 2030, we are pretty much in stagnation, as limits are mostly budget, skill and time, not technology technology for sure is going to mostly give us real time reflections, right now most reflections in games are either screen space reflections and cubemap reflections, those tricks are quite cheap and effective but require some work from the developers, meanwhile raytracing will put most of the workload on user hardware instead isnt it ironic that more realistic reflections in games will require less work from developers?
@@arekkrol9758 2 Minute Papers just did a thing on Nvidia making headway on realtime 3d raytrace rendering. Cutting down rendering times to a fraction of what they were will make future game and tv show effects look absolutely beautiful.
Hey, I'm a 90's kid, I like my 3D models simple and blocky. Seriously though, I bear witness to my own complete disinterest in realistic graphics. A good art style though, that'll grab my attention. Also, I like videogames being videogamey. The music, the graphics. It just looks and sounds real now. Old school and indie games it is for me then.
I remember the first time seeing parallax mapping in the original F.E.A.R and I was blown away, me and my friends couldn't figure out how they were making their bullet hole effects look so realistic as they were parallax mapped to give depth, we assumed it was actually taking chunks out of the walls. Really fucking cool technology.
The first time I noticed this technique was when I first went through Fallout 3. I noticed that the bullet holes were more like craters with actual depth, and that blew my mind like nothing else.
Parallax mapping is also a continuation of the old good "voxel" terrain renderers like seen in Commanche and Outcast. In those it was common to raysurf or share ray distance between pixels so the ray casting/tracing doesn't have to visit same heightmap texels multiple times.
It continues to impress me the kinds of tricks developers have created to optimize games so well while also making the worlds feel alive. I remember being blown away when I first saw this being used in A Hat in Time (a number of windows in Mafia Island use this technique, or at least something very similar). It does such a convincing job of creating a more authentic environment.
You should never work in game dev then. All illusion will be broken. I've not played a game in 12 years that I haven't stared at and spent my time looking at how they made it. The best thing about game dev though is there is always something new around the corner. So every now and again we get excited by the tech that you see 2-3 years later but by that time we are bored of it :D
3:18 LMAO, this is my first time watching any of your videos and I legit thought it was over. Started comment scrolling, realized this video was JUST dropped, then got scared shitless by you talking again. Great humor, great information, awesome video, keep it up
They need to add a rule in to deal with rooms on the edges of buildings to allow it to look more natural. For example, get rid of doors that would lead to someone walking out of the 7th floor and onto the mains street.
It can be done but sorting is a massive pain in the bum and needs cpu. Im sure spiderman 2 will do it on 1 they were super held back with regards to cpu power
In practice parallax mapping is taken a step further and POM(occlusion) is used which is essentially the same technique but with more samples and a LERP
stylized station so far your videos have REALLY REALLY REALLY HELPED ME OUT, it was because of you and naruto and wind waker that i found out i wanted to do cell-shaded games and i want to do 2d-3d ones too, your channel was and is becoming the most help for me, thanks man!
Now correct me if I’m wrong, but don’t games generally use triangles for “polygons” making these windows 2 polys? Perhaps there are different 3D rendering engines, for games or other software, just curious on that
Yep I did notice that all the rooms lead into one another in spiderman & i did notice they were planes if anything it could of done with more blinds & closed curtains.
This is really well made and interesting, I love learning how things work that i’d never even considered while playing! also that voice crack made me double take lmao
well.. to be very precise, polygon just means many-gon/n-gon. So a polygon can be anything from a triangle, quad, pentagon, and so on. I think what you're referring to is that a quad is made of 2 triangle aka tris, and that's indeed true 😄
03:11 Tip: you can make basically any normal map or height map you want to extremely easily by importing your texture into the software called "meshify"
I feel parallax rooms look great from afar, but when you get too close the illusion breaks really badly. Furniture painted on the back wall, corner rooms not matching up, doors leading directly to a 20 story drop... perhaps masking the cubemap with semi transparent curtains or blinds to obfuscate the shapes behind them would help sell it immensely.
I wonder if you could combine that texture parallax from the bricks with the room parallax, so that the fake room appears to have more depth, such as making the furniture warp a bit as you pan past it.
No need. We have a new technique that created a sliced parallax map which gives 100% authenticity on the inside of the room to look like geometry. You literally have to look mega close to figure out if its using it.
Its so insane to me how parallax mapping manages to work and use less resources on top. Whoever thought of and realized that system is a cream-of-the-top computer genius.
I had looked into how Parallax Mapping worked for the windows back when Spider-Man first came out, but it was hard to understand exactly how it made an ENTIRE room. Your breakdown was very simple and clear, and the Unreal Engine demos around 4:06 really sealed the deal. I love the long environment breakdowns but these shorter videos on specific elements are really great to watch.
If that's what it takes for devs to build up their energy towards more dynamic and more creative and less bugged games I'm totally okay with it because it works.
First experienced this when playing Forza Horizon 5 when it first launched. I went I to drone mode and noticed that a nearby house had an interior. However u can easily tell that the interior is not fully modeled as playground didn’t put a lot of time into them
thats definitely a parallaxed texture bud. You can tell by looking at how the texture shifts under the character's feet at the camera rotates. a normal map is more static
this video is insanely good as far as editing, presentation, and content go- but the various audio tracks are all over the place and detracts so much effort
I'm studying Optics from the book written by Hecht for my next Physics exam, I just barely scratched the surface of how many application it have. There is one of these. Also Thank Euclide for the first ever treatise on optics, still widely used today. He was the first one to shoot a straight line from the eye to create a theoretical model.
You should start uploading in 4k. Considering your channel is about video game graphics and art, I think your channel could greatly benefit from this. Love the videos, by the way!
i think each room isnt unique though, i imagine quite a few are reused and probably randomized so its prolly around a couple hundred or so if i had to guess unless its also randomly enerated, although i dont actually know for certain as i havnt personaly checked
My "explain like I'm 5" for parallax mapping is that it's like that cool street art you might have seen online or in person, where someone draws an image on the floor which, when viewed from a specific angle, looks like a 3D image but from the wrong angle just looks like a smear. The GPU is doing the same thing, but it's just redrawing that street art every frame based on the angle the camera is at.
You could've mentioned that height mapping is commonly used together with a normal map to simulate the lighting in a way that looks more convincing but guess not
I'm obsessed with your videos. I just watched all of them back to back to back. How have I not seen them until now? very well edited and perfect amount of information. Thank you.
I do a lot of Skyrim modding, especially armor and creatures (which, as far as the game engine is concerned, are basically the same thing). One of my favorite things to do is make a mesh super shiny and change the cubemap. with the right one, you can make a black armor look like it's got the universe baked into the metal. I've also done a little bit of work with multi-layer parallax effects, but it's a bit more complex to do with the programs I use.
Normal maps are more appropriate for showing height data from any angle. We started with bump mapping, which used the displacement map to simulate displacement, but bump mapping doesn’t correctly show the shadows or height from all angles. Normal maps do.
Do you have a tutorial or can you show one where you can do large amounts of buildings quickly as I gotta have a good workflow but that video of spider man on the building up close like that is so awesome
F.E.A.R. from 2005 uses this technique for bullet holes. When you look at them they're obviously 2D textures but they move according to the player's position giving the feeling of leaving an entire room full of deep holes.
I first noticed this specific technique being used in Borderlands 3. I immediately recognized what was going on with it and the cleverness of it made me really happy. :)
About the Genshin part, I've always been confused because I see the floor and I'm like: "Hey, this has height and all, it's really well made!", but then I lower the camera and it's all plain and I'm like "Huh? It's a 2D texture?". Lastly I check it from diferent angles and see again the height and get confused lmao
New thought. Could someone make a character using parallax mapping from 5 sides of a box simulating each direction of the character? Even better would be to do it from multiple poses to simulate movement.
In Godzilla vs Kong they used the same technique on the windows of the buildings i and Hong Kong. Since they had built a 1-1 Hong Kong replica in 3D, finding anywhere to trim geometry was key. Parallax Window mapping helped boost the visual feel of the city without adding additional render time.
If you’re confused about what he means about expensive or taxing. It refers to the stress that is being put on your hardware to run the game. You want less stress on stuff that doesn’t really matter compared to stuff that is more important. 😊
Are you sure that genshin doesn't just uses backed in shadows or just texture and roughness maps? It's hard to see from just your videos but the tiles shown didnt seem to overlap like they would on hight maps Edit: actually I think I see some of the shadows disappear, but the video is too fast and I can't quite see it well on my phone, so could be either option still
Parallax mapping is also how RDR2’s landscape textures look very detailed at times. All the little rocks, dirt, paths look like they’re tessellated but a closer look at them reveals it’s parallaxed
Its a mix of POM and tessellation.
i always wondered why RDR2 is so detailed , i thought its the game engine that can render normal map in such an amazing way
I thought you were trying to say R2D2 at first 😂
Portal also uses these techniques, for example the wall lights
@@asovamain4292 same
0:33 i just love how the interior changes in a split second when the protagonist crawls around the corner. Suddenly, a kitchen area turns into a dining area with a door on the left that leads you out of the building on the 30th floor.
Those must be the emergency exits. There were plans to put in a fire escape, but they ran out of money and figured just the doors would be good enough.
Yeah, the problem is the window. You cannot fake that with textures. One possibility would be to use real rooms for the corners of a building, but that is expensive.
@@prezadent1 lmao
Playing the game, I even found some rooms where you can see a large room from one windows but the same area is salled off from the window next to it
Indeed a limitation of the technique, but I’d argue the profits (greatly) outweigh the expense.
Also, this could be used to great effect in another game to be purposefully ‘trippy’.
A common problem with parallax mapping on surfaces that characters stand on is that it makes the player look like they are floating above the ground, as is seen when turning around in Genshin impact.
One way to fix that would be to clip the player just a tiny bit into the ground. Just enough that it still looks Natural
I'm not well versed in 3D but couldn't they have used normal maps instead of displacement maps? Normals may not be the best for low end devices but it could be visually better. But then again it's a game and not really a render piece.
@@Mempler The character will still look like they're sliding on the ground.
@@user-oo7dw4qw4b both normal maps and displacement maps are used, the difference is that a normal map tells how a surface interacts with light, while a displacement map is more about what parts of the surface the player can see (the whole "fake depth" bit from the video). To get the best kind of results you want to use both since they provide information on different aspects of a material
@@Yotrymp oh yeah true due to it not being really transparent but rather an illusion hmm. What if you multiply the intersection with the height map?
4:16 The Bedroom in this Parallax Cubemap is amazing!
It gives the illusion of a second room, that is wider than the cube itself
That does look really cool ! I think that the extra bit is distorted, if you look really closely, because they are pushing the technique quite far. It's like the original problem of textures with depth looking too flat, but they've buried the problem one level of illusion deeper than normal. My brain didn't even notice the distortion, first and second time around.
What game is 0:57 ?
@@KFUPMar Ori. Can't tell which part of the game series it is tho.
@@snowtrooper3871 thanks!
Finally it's here the clip you all wanted.
czcams.com/video/b0n29v2MJEc/video.html
Really interesting. Thinking about how older games handle this, it's usually that every window has glare on it / reflects the sky. I never thought of this as overcoming the limitation of not needing to draw every single window, but it's actually a really elegant solution. It's fine from a distance. parallaxing seems to be the next step up. Easter egg should be one room you can actually interact with :D
Older games have used this technique. I think gta 5 has some of this but well it's old so it's less better
@@twodollarking8009 I'm not sure when they were first used but I'm specifically remembering games like battlefield 2142, NFS and James bond games on gamecube.
Older games, and even lots of modern games, seem to be happy to just use a texture of a window
@@twodollarking8009 they don't use this for windows (as most buildings can be entered/destroyed) but in Crysis they used Parallax Occlusion Mapping pretty heavily. They even went an extra step above and made the parallax textures self-shadow... And that game came out in 2007.
@@tehguitarque I was playing Hitman Blood Money (2006) and noticed something like it being used for some textures like wooden planks and buttons
1:50 Personally my favorite part of the video. Right here is genuinely some of the best insight on game development I've seen, you break things down so well.
voice crack
@@nsa3967 indeed
@@nsa3967 nah he dropped the soap
gAAme
nice one
It amazes me how creativity has developed solutions in every restrictions 👍
You got 2D? No problem, use parallax like Super Mario
You got restricted polygon in PS1? No problem, use fog to ease the render process like Silent Hill
You got full city map? No problem, use cube map to make those windows looks alive
Ironically most 2d games these days are faked in 3d.
@@agsystems8220 don't hate the game hate the player
Restrictions are a boon to creativity. I suppose another way to put it is: Necessity is the mother of invention
@@agsystems8220 Shovel Knight is an example of this. The game is actually in 3D.
@@hipjoeroflmto4764 Way to take a phrase out of context, lmao.
1:51 my boy is on puberty
2:27 too.
What?!
Haha
it looks so good and works really well especially when you're just swinging by them real fast
Don't get confused by Parallax and Tessellation
*1.* Parallax is a 2D Fake 3D to fool your eyes, it's the old tech used first in FEAR Game back in 2005 on PC, and it was supported by DirectX 8 & 9, DirectX 9 has higher depth and improvement over DirectX 8
*2.* Tessellation is a Fake 3D Cover of the lower polygons, which makes it completely High polygons, that you can't see a single square or visible polygon, it was used first in DirectX 11 Games Like S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Call of Pripyat on Characters model
Yeah I always loved those deep POM bullet impacts in FEAR. Perfect Dark Zero on the X360 had some really nice POM brick textures too. Crysis 2 with its DX11 update also had some great textures with it. Really cool tool/trick in games.
Serious Sam: The First Encounter used tesselation in 2001, specifically the ATI-developed TruForm technology. Sadly it didn't catch on.
You got me interested which the earliest parallax title was, if it was available as early as DX8.
@@WTFBOOMDOOM I played the Serious Sam: The First Encounter it doesn't have tesselation, also i sreach on CZcams i didn't find one, will you show me proof a video or gameplay photo please
@@FantasyNero Search for Serious Sam TruForm here on CZcams, there are some videos. The game came out in early 2001, the technology appeared in August; it was introduced to Serious Sam in patch 1.06 from December '01. According to Wikipedia it only supported new Radeon cards (makes sense because video cards aged very fast back then). It was later introduced to the Terascale architecture in 2007.
ok good, I was expecting this to be a stupid technicality of "one polygon" meaning "one type of polygon", explaining how 3d objects are (usually) made up of all triangles
Devs could've just made the windows reflective so we won't see the interior that's why I appreciate them doing this to make the world a bit more immersive
It’s not immersive at all. Ever heard of curtains and blinds?
This is probably considerably cheaper than reflections. :D
@BlueDart28 I would say it's still better than just flat textures without any depth
@@Volkswagen_Yeetle r you dumb?😂😂 youve never been to a major city huh? They dont have curtains n all the windows open n the lights r always on
@@papichulo8749 I live in a major city. Maybe mine has businesses that actually care about security and privacy. 🤡🤡🤡🤡🤡
0:20 and 4:05 - Nice to see our maps as part of the explanation, very well done video :)
It's always cool to learn all these techniques.
I kinda love seeing that even with all this processing power such smart tricks are still relevant.
@AndrewWithEase11 11 Bad day?
@AndrewWithEase11 11 Then work on your general attitude.
Whoa, what happened here?
@@TheJungaBoon I have no idea.
O, the guy seems to have deleted his original comment.
@AndrewWithEase11 11 I didn't. Just can't see it.
make fun of my voice crack over here
I mean you play genshin so it's acceptable. Cool video tho
Bro your voice at 1:50 💀💀
ok 👍
You better call your mom
someone can’t handle hate 😂
I was hoping you would have said "crysis" and not genshin impact as an example... "crysis" was one of the first games to use parrallax occlusion mapping and it was so advanced that it blew everyones mind how mud tracks and rocks are 3D and realistic.
This guy is obsessed with genshin. He finds a way to mention it in almost every video
@@Rossilaz58 yeah i mean it is cool with the art style and modern take on the cell shading but i mean come on it doesn't use any new cutting edge tech. All of that existed way before genshin and the games which used it the most intensively and perfectly should be showcased... or mentioned.
I'd like to hear about other games not just genshin how it does something xD
@@sermerlin1 yeahhh the genshin shilling is a little worrying, at least from someone who’s never played it (I mean, it looks like an overly produced predatory mobile game from the outside looking it, but I’ve been wrong before 🤷♂️) but if you ignore that these videos are actually really informative so I watch em lol
@@maninblack3410 In the past he's described Genshin Impact as the prettiest game he has ever played. I'm inclined to agree. It's a truly breathtaking game
Damn shame that nobody else in the AAA scene seems to be interested in making a proper standalone game with the same anime-inspired art style
"not genshin".. Mentioning genshin and using it as an exemple in this video is valid and poses no problem.
This channel isn't about game dev history, and showing who did it the first or the best isn't the goal here either.
Genshin is relevant here because it is popular now, more than crysis is today, and the creator seems to enjoy it too.
Sure, that 15 year old game that isnt a pionner in that particular tech might have used it very well too, but you're just using it as an excuse, trying to invalidate genshin because you don't like that game you never played
Parallax mapping is a trip! I remember being amazed at the technique being used in Oblivion, and Parallax Occlusion mapping in Crysis, back in 2008.
Never could I imagine it being used to simulate interior rooms in entire skyscrapers.
1:51 Hardest voice crack on yt
2:52 your pc is FIGHTING bro
1:50
Nice voice crack
It's amazing to think about how these little rooms, in what is considered a graphically amazing game today, will , in the next ten years, be considered old-school.
Like , my kid in the not far off year of 2030 playing the game "Wow, the rooms weren't even 3D, they were just flat textures. I can't believe people thought these were good graphics."
i think itll be more along the lines of how we look at optimizations in older games today, especially the old pokemon games. its less of "wow they really couldnt even afford to use a bit more data on the textures?" and more along the lines of "look what they were able to do with the technology of the time"
dont realy except that big change in 2030, we are pretty much in stagnation, as limits are mostly budget, skill and time, not technology
technology for sure is going to mostly give us real time reflections, right now most reflections in games are either screen space reflections and cubemap reflections, those tricks are quite cheap and effective but require some work from the developers, meanwhile raytracing will put most of the workload on user hardware instead
isnt it ironic that more realistic reflections in games will require less work from developers?
@@arekkrol9758 2 Minute Papers just did a thing on Nvidia making headway on realtime 3d raytrace rendering. Cutting down rendering times to a fraction of what they were will make future game and tv show effects look absolutely beautiful.
Hey, I'm a 90's kid, I like my 3D models simple and blocky.
Seriously though, I bear witness to my own complete disinterest in realistic graphics. A good art style though, that'll grab my attention. Also, I like videogames being videogamey. The music, the graphics. It just looks and sounds real now. Old school and indie games it is for me then.
1:51 voice crack
Thank god I wasn’t the only one that noticed
I noticed that lol
Game deVelopers
I remember the first time seeing parallax mapping in the original F.E.A.R and I was blown away, me and my friends couldn't figure out how they were making their bullet hole effects look so realistic as they were parallax mapped to give depth, we assumed it was actually taking chunks out of the walls. Really fucking cool technology.
The first time I noticed this technique was when I first went through Fallout 3. I noticed that the bullet holes were more like craters with actual depth, and that blew my mind like nothing else.
Parallax mapping is also a continuation of the old good "voxel" terrain renderers like seen in Commanche and Outcast.
In those it was common to raysurf or share ray distance between pixels so the ray casting/tracing doesn't have to visit same heightmap texels multiple times.
It continues to impress me the kinds of tricks developers have created to optimize games so well while also making the worlds feel alive. I remember being blown away when I first saw this being used in A Hat in Time (a number of windows in Mafia Island use this technique, or at least something very similar). It does such a convincing job of creating a more authentic environment.
You should never work in game dev then. All illusion will be broken. I've not played a game in 12 years that I haven't stared at and spent my time looking at how they made it.
The best thing about game dev though is there is always something new around the corner. So every now and again we get excited by the tech that you see 2-3 years later but by that time we are bored of it :D
3:18 LMAO, this is my first time watching any of your videos and I legit thought it was over. Started comment scrolling, realized this video was JUST dropped, then got scared shitless by you talking again. Great humor, great information, awesome video, keep it up
Your videos got the some of the best perfect mix of explaining things in video games graphics in more casual way.
They need to add a rule in to deal with rooms on the edges of buildings to allow it to look more natural. For example, get rid of doors that would lead to someone walking out of the 7th floor and onto the mains street.
thats already been done in Unreal Engine 5. Check The Matrix Awakens demo.
It can be done but sorting is a massive pain in the bum and needs cpu. Im sure spiderman 2 will do it on 1 they were super held back with regards to cpu power
Thank you for your sacrifice. Using a Star Wars gag is a ballsy move in terms of monetization
So nobody is gonna mention the way he pronounces 'games' like 'James' at 0:01?
With meshes being made from triangles, I wonder if that one rectangle was actually two triangle polygons…
Yeah
In practice parallax mapping is taken a step further and POM(occlusion) is used which is essentially the same technique but with more samples and a LERP
I love it when youtube comments know some shit about game dev. What do you work as?
That suspense between Jame and game was too perfect 😂
1:50 lil bro got voice crack
stylized station so far your videos have REALLY REALLY REALLY HELPED ME OUT, it was because of you and naruto and wind waker that i found out i wanted to do cell-shaded games and i want to do 2d-3d ones too, your channel was and is becoming the most help for me, thanks man!
I'm not a developer but this is very interesting. Is this what they did in the matrix ue5 demo?
Yes, same technique.
Now correct me if I’m wrong, but don’t games generally use triangles for “polygons” making these windows 2 polys?
Perhaps there are different 3D rendering engines, for games or other software, just curious on that
You’re correct - this takes more than 1 polygon.
Many terms or stats in this video are just not used correctly.
Yep I did notice that all the rooms lead into one another in spiderman & i did notice they were planes if anything it could of done with more blinds & closed curtains.
Such a cool technique that achieves so much! It's really quite impressive considering how simple it really is. Nice!
Can you make a video on how deformation shaders work? Like when games have snow or mud effects?
Those are just vertex shaders
Dude doesn't know. He doesnt even know what he's talking about in this video.
4:31 - the door to the middle of nowhere
1:18 PLEASE seek help jesus christ
1:25 THE SWORD ON KAZUHA IM DYING
This is really well made and interesting, I love learning how things work that i’d never even considered while playing!
also that voice crack made me double take lmao
you are the only other person to talk about that voice crack
Minor correction wouldn't it be 2 polygons?
As mentioned it's a plane and a square
A polygon is a triangle
You need 2 triangles to make one square
well.. to be very precise, polygon just means many-gon/n-gon. So a polygon can be anything from a triangle, quad, pentagon, and so on.
I think what you're referring to is that a quad is made of 2 triangle aka tris, and that's indeed true 😄
03:11
Tip: you can make basically any normal map or height map you want to extremely easily by importing your texture into the software called "meshify"
I feel parallax rooms look great from afar, but when you get too close the illusion breaks really badly. Furniture painted on the back wall, corner rooms not matching up, doors leading directly to a 20 story drop... perhaps masking the cubemap with semi transparent curtains or blinds to obfuscate the shapes behind them would help sell it immensely.
I wonder if you could combine that texture parallax from the bricks with the room parallax, so that the fake room appears to have more depth, such as making the furniture warp a bit as you pan past it.
No need. We have a new technique that created a sliced parallax map which gives 100% authenticity on the inside of the room to look like geometry. You literally have to look mega close to figure out if its using it.
@@tehf00n what is the new technique called
Its so insane to me how parallax mapping manages to work and use less resources on top. Whoever thought of and realized that system is a cream-of-the-top computer genius.
Never would have thought to combine Parallax and cubemaps (which have been used in games forever). Such an elegant yet brilliant solution.
First time I ever noticed parallax mapping was in Fallout 3 on 360. I was geeking out how the rubble looked 3D even though it wasn't
I had looked into how Parallax Mapping worked for the windows back when Spider-Man first came out, but it was hard to understand exactly how it made an ENTIRE room. Your breakdown was very simple and clear, and the Unreal Engine demos around 4:06 really sealed the deal. I love the long environment breakdowns but these shorter videos on specific elements are really great to watch.
If that's what it takes for devs to build up their energy towards more dynamic and more creative and less bugged games I'm totally okay with it because it works.
1:15 you play genshin impact, stopped watching this video after that
Thanks for your input
ok and?
Bro genshin is fine the community isnt
Just like fortnite, some cods, roblox and any other game
@@Zernation the game is bad the community is trash
@@niputaidea1982 and that is your opinion about the game everyone gets to have one
First experienced this when playing Forza Horizon 5 when it first launched. I went I to drone mode and noticed that a nearby house had an interior. However u can easily tell that the interior is not fully modeled as playground didn’t put a lot of time into them
2:06 The ground is 100000% just using a normal map. These are two completely different things than the projection stuff.
thats definitely a parallaxed texture bud. You can tell by looking at how the texture shifts under the character's feet at the camera rotates. a normal map is more static
for anyone curious, ACNH also does this for some of the wallpapers/floors!
We use this technique at my studio in animated shorts too
It's easy, renders very fast and it gives good detail
3:26 missed oportunity to put on vsauce music
i ALWAYS wondered how this was done. great video : )
this video is insanely good as far as editing, presentation, and content go- but the various audio tracks are all over the place and detracts so much effort
Gta vi maybe use parallax
It’s very likely this is the case, doubt they would allow you to go in a bunch of interiors because of performance issues that may come along
@@Max-yu2ydactually you cant even see inside of any windows
I'm studying Optics from the book written by Hecht for my next Physics exam, I just barely scratched the surface of how many application it have.
There is one of these.
Also Thank Euclide for the first ever treatise on optics, still widely used today.
He was the first one to shoot a straight line from the eye to create a theoretical model.
This is actually ground breaking concept for making video games👌👌
The parallax mapping in Genshin makes it looks like the player is floating at certain angles. My brain hurts.
1:18
Only in Genshin? Someone has skipped F.E.A.R. or even Payday
1:50 that's one hell of a voice crack
“I was playing genshin impact”
-10 respect
Pov: didn't play the game and you hate it because it's popular to do so. Typical 14 year old behavior
dude i noticed genshin textures acting funky but never in a million years would i think it's connected to spiderman somehow. great video!
At 1:51, I thoroughly enjoyed the slight emphatic tweak to the word "game developers". Good day.
You should start uploading in 4k. Considering your channel is about video game graphics and art, I think your channel could greatly benefit from this. Love the videos, by the way!
One room, one polygon. Millions of rooms, millions of polygons.
i think each room isnt unique though, i imagine quite a few are reused and probably randomized so its prolly around a couple hundred or so if i had to guess unless its also randomly enerated, although i dont actually know for certain as i havnt personaly checked
Your explanation makes it so much more easier to understand!
1:51 I don't know why but I laughed so hard to your voice crack :D
My "explain like I'm 5" for parallax mapping is that it's like that cool street art you might have seen online or in person, where someone draws an image on the floor which, when viewed from a specific angle, looks like a 3D image but from the wrong angle just looks like a smear.
The GPU is doing the same thing, but it's just redrawing that street art every frame based on the angle the camera is at.
2:21 Actually that's a ray, vectors only encode directions, ray have both a direction and a position
You could've mentioned that height mapping is commonly used together with a normal map to simulate the lighting in a way that looks more convincing but guess not
I'm obsessed with your videos. I just watched all of them back to back to back. How have I not seen them until now? very well edited and perfect amount of information. Thank you.
1:51 The way you said Game Developers made me chuckle
I do a lot of Skyrim modding, especially armor and creatures (which, as far as the game engine is concerned, are basically the same thing). One of my favorite things to do is make a mesh super shiny and change the cubemap. with the right one, you can make a black armor look like it's got the universe baked into the metal.
I've also done a little bit of work with multi-layer parallax effects, but it's a bit more complex to do with the programs I use.
Normal maps are more appropriate for showing height data from any angle. We started with bump mapping, which used the displacement map to simulate displacement, but bump mapping doesn’t correctly show the shadows or height from all angles. Normal maps do.
super epic breakdown
Guys, Stylized Station got shot in a shopping mall shooting in Miami, R.I.P
Do you have a tutorial or can you show one where you can do large amounts of buildings quickly as I gotta have a good workflow but that video of spider man on the building up close like that is so awesome
F.E.A.R. from 2005 uses this technique for bullet holes. When you look at them they're obviously 2D textures but they move according to the player's position giving the feeling of leaving an entire room full of deep holes.
1:51 that voice crack though
4:46
Stylized Station: Forza 4
Also Stylized Station: shows footage of FH5
Can you blame him? All Forza games look the same these days lol
@@hotel_arcadia probably not
I first noticed this specific technique being used in Borderlands 3.
I immediately recognized what was going on with it and the cleverness of it made me really happy. :)
About the Genshin part, I've always been confused because I see the floor and I'm like: "Hey, this has height and all, it's really well made!", but then I lower the camera and it's all plain and I'm like "Huh? It's a 2D texture?". Lastly I check it from diferent angles and see again the height and get confused lmao
New thought. Could someone make a character using parallax mapping from 5 sides of a box simulating each direction of the character? Even better would be to do it from multiple poses to simulate movement.
Wait where is the parelax video at that he talked about by the end? 3:00
This trick is also used in SimCity 2013, all buildings look like they have actual interiors
In Godzilla vs Kong they used the same technique on the windows of the buildings i and Hong Kong. Since they had built a 1-1 Hong Kong replica in 3D, finding anywhere to trim geometry was key. Parallax Window mapping helped boost the visual feel of the city without adding additional render time.
I LOVE GVK I LOVE GVK I LOVE GVK
I remember when stalker came out and was one of the first games with parallax mapping. I remember spending ages looking at the bricks lol.
This is probably the most informative video under five minutes I have ever seen.
If you’re confused about what he means about expensive or taxing. It refers to the stress that is being put on your hardware to run the game. You want less stress on stuff that doesn’t really matter compared to stuff that is more important. 😊
Are you sure that genshin doesn't just uses backed in shadows or just texture and roughness maps? It's hard to see from just your videos but the tiles shown didnt seem to overlap like they would on hight maps
Edit: actually I think I see some of the shadows disappear, but the video is too fast and I can't quite see it well on my phone, so could be either option still
cheapest, easiest way to FILL SPACE without costing you resources. gotta love it.
This entire video was a "well, duh. Did you seriously just figure this out?" type of feel.