#technical art

An Eevee card render for @poketcg-art’s redraw event, in which I was a bit more focused on the GPU definition of draw than actually redrawing the art. Render made in Godot, card artwork and graphics made in Photoshop.

I contributed a 9000 word article about making this effect! note you will need a browser with WebGPU, and for reasons I don't quite understand, I get bad performance hitches on Firefox, so unfortunately it works best in Chrome. native version can be compiled from the source here

It's about divergence-free fields, and writing cross-platform compute shader programs using Rust and wgpu! If those sound like things that might interest you, give it a read :3

Artem Erikenov

Grooming artist / CFX artist

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one cool feature is this height-based blending:

Left: regular lerp Right: custom height blending

I ran into some interesting challenges actually and realized that most methods for blending between two heightmaps actually have some drawbacks for different scenarios so I might do a whole blog post on how to properly blend two heightmaps together if that's something people are interested in

Generally, you'd have what's called a directional light in your scene. This directional light is usually a stand-in for your sun. If you look at a room in broad daylight, it's not just the sun that's your light source. But directional lights mean you miss out on that contrast if your window is not a sun-facing window, which can make your lighting look kinda flat.

So this is just fine:

But the moment it's made parallel instead of perpendicular....

The lighting starts looking a little samey.

IRL's, every single window and door you have is technically a light source! Additionally, I've observed that each room's parallel light mostly stays the same, varying intensity. (source: my room has a north facing window, so it's almost entirely lit by indirect lighting)

This makes sense. Compare that to a scene with some kind of actual bounced indirect lighting using some kind of Global Illumination, and you get something like this:

Hm. That's a massive performance hit. Could there be some way to do it cheaper?

Add a second sun directional light for bounced indirect lighting. This is a copy of the sun, at roughly 10% of the sun's intensity, lighting in the exact opposite direction to the sun with no shadows.

So now when we go parallel, there's still something going on that gives contrast. Most importantly, trust the process:

Now you can add a shadow casting parallel light to your sun with the same settings as your bounced indirect:

I think we're starting to see some resemblance! At its core, we've reached the point where there's something technically novel going on. We can then expand from here! For example, I can now make my light source interpolate between a set angle for each room when building its mood lighting.

In my heart of hearts, I believe the most powerful thing, the secret sauce for something that looks, and most importantly, feels awesome is intentionality. We're not aiming to simulate reality anyways, we're aiming to provide a certain experience to our players.

That said, I do feel the hate is misdirected. The reason why this is ubiquitous today is not because of laziness, but rather, executive pressure means devs don't get the time/space to be intentional.

Also, yes, you can be very intentional with more expensive GI, raytracing and all the fancy schmancy new tech. That's what differentiates really good implementations with the eh ones. This isn't a dig at raytracing. Like anything else, it's a tool to be used.

Now, having art directed and turned a few dials to make it look good while I was talking about this, here's the final result!