Aand the new Bakery patch is now available on the Asset Store! (and it's still 50% off) assetstore.unity.com/packages/too... #gamedev

If you had an issue on a 50xx GPU after that patch, please try patching again - I've just updated it. Many thanks to @imlexz.bsky.social for testing!

The black friday sale is over, but now there's a new one! Because Christmas is near or something? I guess! #gamedev (And if you're on a >= 590 driver, please try the github patch! It's almost ready for the Store release)

My "No Graphics API" blog post is live! Please repost :) www.sebastianaaltonen.com/blog/no-grap... I spend 1.5 years doing this. Full rewrite last summer and another partial rewrite last month. As Hemingway said: "First draft of everything is always shit".

Bakery has been updated to support the new drivers! Please try updating via github/patcher. If no issues are reported within the next week, I'll update the Asset Store version. The new version should also bake faster (!)

Nvidia driver 591.44 breaks OptiX6 support and therefore Bakery. If you get "failed to load optix library", please use any older driver. In the meantime I'm waiting for a response from nvidia and working on a patch myself.

you can also use morton order as your 'hash' function to increase cache coherence even more. we used this all over dreams. admittedly not in an ao caching context, but one where build rates were lower. but, still worth a read in case it sparks any ideas in your head. its one of my faves ever

The post on using spatial hashing with raytraced ambient occlusion attracted quite a bit of interest so I expanded it into a blog post to discuss how it works behind the scenes to both reduce the noise and its cost. interplayoflight.wordpress.com/2025/11/23/s...

Does anyone know (or happen to be) a person with a reasonable (D)SLR in Riga (Latvia)? I would love (and can pay for) a little texture photoshoot of a few buildings 🙏🏙️

And the real time preview is also discounted 50% ❤️ assetstore.unity.com/packages/too...

Bakery is on the Black Friday sale! 👀👀 assetstore.unity.com/packages/too... #gamedev

Mirror inside a mirror behind a glass reflecting a stained glass (photo)

Totally normal skinning

Bakery v1.97 is live on the Asset Store! assetstore.unity.com/packages/too... Better performance, colored transparencies, better light probes, presets, rotatable volumes and lots of other things. 🥨 #gamedev #raytracing #lightmaps

Continuing on the topic of GPU utilisation and performance, as a practical example, I looked a bit deeper into the impact of vertex shader exports on the cost of a drawcall and wrote another blog post with some observations interplayoflight.wordpress.com/2025/09/21/t...

So, I’m preparing the new Asset Store version (v1.97) for Bakery. Current changelog is here: docs.google.com/document/d/1... If you can test the latest github version (which is basically what’s gonna land on the store), just to make sure nothing suddenly broke, that would help a lot! 🙂

Another stunner. "Video Game Blurs (and how the best one works)" blog.frost.kiwi/dual-kawase/

So it works now! If you have Bakery, can you try getting the latest github patch and using it? Add "Bakery Light Filter" component to an object to make it act like stained glass 😋 (video from RTPreview for fanciness, but it looks the same when baked) #gamedev

Hacking around some translucent colored shadows for Bakery & RTPreview...

Slides from my SIGGRAPH 2025 and CEDEC 2025 talks “Fast as Hell: idTech 8 Global Illumination”, are now publicly available through the Advances in Real-Time Rendering in Games course. Lecture recordings will be available soon on the course's YouTube channel.

wave_tracer 0.1 released wavetracer.dev wave_tracer combines path tracing and wave optics in a novel way, for practical general-purpose wave simulations across a variety of EM modalities and applications.

New blog post discussing a few approaches to bottleneck reduction and GPU utilisation and performance increase interplayoflight.wordpress.com/2025/08/29/g...

Great Siggraph 2025 presentation of Gran Turismo's tonemapping pipeline, which also includes a fantastic introduction to light perception and tonemapping, its origins and how it evolved over the years with display technology, recommended read: blog.selfshadow.com/publications...

Bakery is on sale again?? A summer sale they say? ✨🥨May I interest you in some fresh warm baked global illumination?🥨💖 assetstore.unity.com/packages/too... #gamedev

Other programmers become goose farmers, and I became a hobbyist tomato farmer :D First harvest, here we go...

Along the river Gradac, near Valjevo 💚

The terrain above is based on an erosion noise implemented by clayjohn and Fewes in this Shadertoy: www.shadertoy.com/view/7ljcRW It's really impressive, more people doing terrain generation should know about it! #ProcGen

Using Bakery realtime preview by @guycalledfrank.bsky.social to check area lights... to be baked into volumes for Light Volumes by @sim.red ... to THEN be used to provide the walls, fog and avatars in #VRChat with realtime light information from the screen. The FUTURE baby~ ¦D

Did you know that GetWindowRect returns -32000 for a minimized window position? And it's not mentioned in msdn docs. Well, now you know.

How to speed up random memory accesses blog.s-schoener.com/2025-07-28-r...

Random observation: I'm noticing that when I'm doing graphics programming, 50% of my work is finding ways to compress and pack data... and when I'm doing gameplay programming, 50% of it is fixing all sorts of jitter/shakiness/abrupt transitions...

Questionable UI, but Decalery now allows you to project receiver's UV1 (for the normal map) to the decal, while moving original decal's UV1 to UV3 (for color/gloss/etc maps). Basically cheap forward-rendered normal-mapped decals.

Oh, Bakery is on a sale again! #gamedev

Basic trigonometric IK, but it's satisfying when it finally works. Previously I wrote an overly complicated position-based solver, but it was buggy and wasn't worth it 🥲

Added de-ringing option to L2 light probes. Unlike Unity's "remove ringing" checkbox, this one is actually a slider you can tweak to remove less/more. At max value it gets almost close to L1, but seems to fix ringing/negative values completely. Oh, I also made L2 work for APV.

So previously Bakery had 2 light probe baking modes: L1 and Legacy (=L2 but via convolving in-engine rendered cubemaps). L1 was 1st-class citizen, since it also works for dense 3D texture volumes (no way anyone's reading 9 textures). Well, now L2 is finally a "native" mode too.

Some interesting new upscaling technique from the almighty Suslik www.shadertoy.com/view/MXjcWK

"Phosphor" for(float i,z,d;i++<8e1;o+=(cos(d/.1+vec4(0,2,4,0))+1.)/d*z){vec3 p=z*normalize(FC.rgb*2.-r.xyy),a=normalize(cos(vec3(4,2,0)+t-d*8.));p.z+=5.,a=a*dot(a,p)-cross(a,p);for(d=1.;d++<9.;)a+=sin(a*d+t).yzx/d;z+=d=.05*abs(length(p)-3.)+.04*abs(a.y);}o=tanh(o/1e4);

Hardware virtual textures look like a marvelous tool for large terrains or volume compression. Alas, they are in a sad state in terms of performance and usability. And strangely, the (very bad) binding perfs varies a lot with the driver. → read here: hal.science/hal-05138369 @rcmz0.bsky.social

Long time no quack 🦆 Progress is slow, but I'm still doing important work on @awaddlefullife.bsky.social! #screenshotsaturday #gamedev

ok I'll do one of those threads too... +1 like = +1 level design aphorism that may or may not be true

New physics simulation technique just dropped graphics.cs.utah.edu/research/pro...

This is a great thread @hillsguy.bsky.social, I'll add a bit more context here for anyone interested. Yes there's no fancy sim - it just uses a water interaction buffer as a target for the particle system rendering, so we could use the power of particle system we already have.

The Unity equivalent, just in case anyone is curious: github.com/frostbone25/...

Nice tricks to improve cubemap box projection appearance

Ocean level breakdown 🌊 Never posted this on Bluesky so here it is o/ #pixelart #indiedev #GameMaker

Decided to check out how water is rendered in Counter-Strike 2. Given how interactive water in CS2 is, I expected to see some cellular fluid simulation, but turns out they just use a low-resolution off-screen buffer with flat 2D decals used for various aspects of water. Reminds me of HL2 water :)

I just published the bidi text stuff I have been working the past months. It's called Skribidi (because all text and font related things need funny name for some reason). github.com/memononen/Sk...

Long vectors for HLSL spec github.com/microsoft/hl... and post devblogs.microsoft.com/directx/hlsl...

It’s really cool to see my talk freely available for everyone. I’m proud of the work our team accomplished, and it means a lot that it’s now accessible to a wider audience. Huge thanks to the GDC team for putting it out there! #AssassinsCreedShadows #GameDevelopment #GDC2025