I wasn’t as invested in the series back then, so wouldn’t have considered getting anything like this, but now I have regrets :) enjoy yours!

Oh that’s quite tempting 😅 especially the patches

The threaded shader debugging is a very welcome feature, thank you!

Screenshot of a label on GitHub showing 2048 commits

I've slowly been hacking away at my engine for years, and recently noticed I was at 2048 commits. Doesn't feel like that long ago I hit 1024, and not that much longer ago I made the first commit.. Making good progress though and still having fun!

With compute skinning & ray tracing in mind, having the indirection makes life much easier, so I’m probably going to change over to that soon. I’ll try to remember to take some measurements as do!

Thanks for the article! In my engine I’ve always created separate vertex buffers for the meshlet data, so I don’t need to do the vertex indirection at runtime. There are plenty of problems with this though.. Have you experimented with the cost of doing the indirection vs doing it directly?

Oh amazing, thank you for getting releases working! I was hoping binary releases were on the way, so I can more easily integrate it into my engine. It’s already part of my pipeline but with some manual steps :)

having a good asset system is so important because it provides the "well" from which all other engine subsystems "drink" their data. any shit factor is multiplied by the number of things that deal with the asset system, and that number is roughly "all of them".

Make that 4! RenderDoc is my main image viewer for anything that isn’t like png or jpg.

A lot of that code is trying to support assets not made for games, like non-triangle meshes & potentially also subdivision surface meshes, so there's a lot of noise from that.

In case it may be interesting to you, here's the result of me working through the same kind of things for my engine a year ago: github.com/Shimmen/Arko.... Might be useful, but there's also a lot of bad/WIP stuff there :)

What about UsdLux, UsdSkel, UsdShade, etc.?

I’m a big fan of OpenUSD, but I think the C++ library really is an obstacle to wider adoption in the games industry. It’s pretty clear that Python is the preferred way to interact with USD.

In other words, I agree with your sentiment! I have some mixed opinions on AI art, but arguing if it’s real art or not is not very fruitful, just like it never has been.

My grandfather was a traditional artist, and had a very strict definition of art. From his POV art was dying, and he’s not wrong given his definition. I tried to explain how many 1000s of people are paid to make art for games, moves & Etsy etc., but I don’t think he really thought of that as art

Using standard surface normals

Using bent normals

Here's a direct before/after bent normals comparison. It's a pretty subtle change, but I think it makes a really big difference when it comes to overall realism.

And here with some varying lighting!

The head asset is the LPS Head from casual-effects.com/data/ by @morgan3d.bsky.social

Real-time render of a head with subsurface scattering & bent normals

Real-time render of a head with subsurface scattering & bent normals, from a different angle

I recently implemented baking of & support for bent normals, which made a pretty nice difference for my subsurface scattering demo scene. These images are captured in real-time from my rendering engine github.com/Shimmen/Arko...