Crashowary, my entry for this years #Megajam is now live on itch! Its a Crash-Like, but you are a Cassowary! Using some of the latest #UnrealEngine tech, Nanite Foliage, Megalights etc. Go give it a try! dylserx.itch.io/crashowary #GameDev #Houdini

I just released Enhanced Chromatic Aberration for Unreal Engine! Get high quality multisampling camera lens refraction inside the engine. Achieve filmic style with smooth blending and a full spectrum of colors:

My plugin for #UnrealEngine is almost done! It lets you blend any mesh. Not just landscape, not PDO. This magic lets you blend anything!🤯 #GameArt #UE5 #GameDev

CHROMIA exotic color grading for Unreal Engine is now available! I made CHROMIA to help create bold, opinionated looks for games or cinematics. Here's what it can do for you:

Coming soon!

Great puzzle games have a kinky kind of dom-sub flirtation thing going on where they dangle puzzles and solutions right in your face where they know you can't see them. The naughtiest most sexual game I've ever played is The Witness. M-rated stuff, 100% not for kids.

Pleased to report that my skeleton and I are cohabitating much better now. We're having a few boundary issues but at least he'll always have my back.

The thing I hate about Blue Prince is that the more I play Blue Prince the more I love Blue Prince and yet I would love Blue Prince more if I could play Blue Prince less while trying to play Blue Prince Blue Prince players know what I'm talking about

SEND HELP there is a SKELETON INSIDE MY BODY

Here's the much-cheaper way to fade a shadow for these raymarched materials: Dithered shadows! They're not especially convincing but let you skip raymarching in the shadow pass entirely.

Raymarching updates: I used Inigo Quilez's blog (link below) to rewrite the raymarched material using fractal SDF noise. Now I'm trying to make it play nicely with Unreal's lighting. This is using shadow maps, with automatic cache invalidation enabled:

Who I follow on BlueSky: 100% gamedevs and creators What BlueSky shows me: 50% politics I click "Show less like this" on every single politics post. Hundreds of times. Algorithm just does not care.

Source control should be the first thing a computer science curriculum teaches. When you can barely code, losing working code is backbreaking. Every day I see someone lose work. Don't even start with code. Write some haikus, change them, then look at your diffs and revert.

I'm still laughing about how terrible a word "octave" is. I'm dealing with noise functions, which deal with frequency in SPACE rather than TIME, as with music. So here we are in the space domain stuck with this nomenclature that doesn't even make sense in the time domain lol

I REGRET MY CHOICE OF DEBUG COLORS i think i'm gonna hurl very grateful the moon is not actually made of cheese

"Bubble tea will be a nice break from thinking about raymarching signed distance fields," I thought. The bubble tea:

An "octave" is a 2:1 frequency ratio, named after the 8 notes it contains after crossing 7 diatonic notes arbitrarily chosen from the 12 tone equal-tempered scale. Worst name ever.

Froze time so I could take a closer look at the raymarched material. There's definitely a bug in my raymarching because the density changes when I pan up or down. I also need to research if there are nice & fast distance field noise functions I can use to march in fewer steps.

Raymarching improvements: - Take big steps until we cross the noise threshold - Binary search smaller steps to approach the exact threshold - Estimate normal via finite difference

Doing some raymarching in Unreal. We get self-shadowed lighting by using a masked material, inferring normals, and providing a pixel depth offset.

A common failure mode when people ask for programming help is not knowing what ingredients are required to solve a problem. No description of what they were doing Or what they expect Or even what's happening now And this reveals how people solve all kinds of life problems.

What games have the best looking fog? Doing some research.

Why are most kids' shows, and books, as bad as they are? A. They perform better than alternatives B. They perform as well as alternatives but are cheaper C. Good taste is rare and hard to achieve organizationally Bluey suggests C (good shows can succeed). Paw Patrol suggests A.

Ten styles of exotic color grading:

This is "Volcano Hunter" for the TRS-80, from 1984. 200 screens of platforming. Dodge or bomb the Druts, and avoid overheating, while collecting gold and fuel. All this for $72 inflation-adjusted dollars.

This preset pays tribute to Cultic, whose hotttt color palette inspired me to make a color grader in the first place!

The Opal preset for my color grader: 1. Modulates iridescence by luminance 2. Shifts hues towards a fire opal palette 3. Modulates saturation and luminance by iridescence. Brightness becomes color.

My exotic color grader is feature complete! Now I'm designing presets for the Fab release:

Modulating hue by luminance in the Oklab color space:

Colors across the sky

SHADER TUTORIAL!! Here's how to recreate my hue-shifting iridescent stylized color grader in 15 seconds:

Exotic color grading for a golden garden

Opalescent highlights:

Iridescent highlights:

Iridescent shadows:

Experimenting with tying saturation to luminance. Here it produces rainbow light shafts.

The color grader now also lets you shift brightness and saturation to match your palette. Almost ready to declare this Done. My last experiment is going to be making it work both before and after Unreal's tonemapping.

"A tricolor palette hue-shifting color grader would be a fun day project" I thought, a week ago. Well, here's a new kind of color grader. (More examples/explanation in replies)

I'm learning Unreal movie rendering so I can make a trailer for my sun distortion VFX. Here's what I came up with today, using: - Cinematic Lens Flares by @dylanbrowne.bsky.social - Smoke & Fog VFX by Hivemind - 3D Text plugin (stealing the idea from @imaginaryblend.bsky.social)

Happy #screenshotsaturday. I'm working on dramatic sunset VFX for Unreal Engine. Light rays parallel to the horizon are refracted, diffracted, and reflected, distorting the shape of the sun. Here's my first draft.

Convergent evolution! Both @runevision.bsky.social and I landed on the same solution to the same problem: achieve screen-scale dithering, in world space, by blending between texel sizes based on depth. Check out his code and explainer. My version is coming to Fab soon!

One of the better features X eventually added was seeing view counts on your posts. It's important to know the difference between: - Nobody saw your post - People saw your post and didn't respond because it's boring BlueSky is a much lonelier void to shout into.

Today I ran into another poor soul who: - Wants something programmed - Will not touch code themselves - Underestimates the complexity by 10-100x - Wants to hire someone to do it These conditions guarantee the only people who will take the job are scamming you or incompetent.

Happy MLK day. New year, new GPU, new approach for procedural mirages & heat shimmers. Before: Model surface heat in screen space. Too many magic numbers and heuristics. Bad on hilly landscapes. After: Model surface heat in render targets captured from overhead:

Here's what happened to Pitch Black during Epic's holiday sale: Discounted sales are in orange. It was a big uptick! I think I lucked out by doing the Holiday sale instead of Black Friday! Fab sellers could do either but not both. Big sellers almost all did Black Friday.

World-Space Dithering Preset: CGA Environment: Military Airport by FreshCan3D

World-Space Dithering Preset: 6-Bit HSV Environment: Downtown West Modular Pack by PurePolygons