#cirivere

did a pretty deep dive into the sparkly sand of journey but hooo boy sky children of the light

this is my shader white whale . some day i want to know how they do this. holding out for their incredibly talented graphics engineer john edwards to do a gdc talk or something on them like he did for the sand in journey. this game runs on phones!!!! its a mobile game!!!!!!!!

all i know is that journey uses something called "blobs" to do the terrain and clouds , which i imagine is some kind of SDF/voxel rendering, meaning instead of making a sphere out of triangles/quads like most games do, they would just say "hey, put a sphere here" and it is a perfect sphere because you can use math to find where the sphere starts/stops.. like here's a simplified example in 2d, where the left is what most render engines do building things out of triangles/quads (or in this case lines), and right, what sdf engines do

so anyways having these things be SDF lets you do a ton of stuff you wouldnt be able to do like smooth noise displacement and fancy lighting calculations (though i imagine a lot of the lighting is baked ahead of time. this game runs on a phone !!!!! but also this game has a day/night/weather cycle so actually it might be realtime ?!?) if it is run ahead of time the lighting setup is probably run in a very similar way to how Actual clouds are rendered and mapped to the clouds in some way (through a texture? through the vertex color? this thing is a SDF does it even have vertex colors? maybe a point cloud generated from the SDF?) and if its realtime. then they either found a very fast way to do that lighting calculation with the SDFs or they found something that approximates it very well

I love this aaartt!! I LOVE THIS ART (seriously I don't know anything about homestuck other than some vague snippets but your art style is cute I love it!)

Mafumafu doodle~ thank you so much for translating things! It’s great to actually understand the things my favourite utaites are saying ahahaha I also became kind of motivated to learn Japanese myself thanks to you and some other translators but because of my final exams at school I only managed to learn hiragana :’)