@MrBeam@mastodon.gamedev.place avatar MrBeam , to random

Third post is live!

This one dives into managing hardware ray tracing in instance-heavy scenes. GPU stalls, occlusion spikes, expensive ray hits and acceleration structures is some of the subjects.
And how we got performance back by tweaking ray hit shading cost, reflections & probe gathering, etc.

If you’re working with Unreal, HWRT, Nanite, or large instanced scenes, I hope you'll find it interesting.

Cheers!

https://real-mrbeam.github.io/2026/01/20/Managing-HWRT-in-Instance-Heavy-Scenes.html



@h4ckernews@mastodon.social avatar h4ckernews Bot , to random
@h4ckernews@mastodon.social avatar h4ckernews Bot , to random
@MrBeam@mastodon.gamedev.place avatar MrBeam , to random

Second blog post is up!

How we optimized Mannequin for Quest 2. About draw calls, occlusion, instancing, CPD, LOD tuning, and a bunch of small tools to get the most out of the Q2.

If you’re into VR performance or technical art, you might like this.

https://real-mrbeam.github.io/2025/12/11/Optimizing-Mannequin.html




@apq@mastodon.gamedev.place avatar apq , to random

Lots of useful material nodes added in 5.7, such as Triplanar (Dithered), for cheap triplanar with only 1 sampler, and HexTile, for seamless tiling.

@MrBeam@mastodon.gamedev.place avatar MrBeam , to random

I was told I need to make a little fuzz about starting a blog, so here goes!

My first post is about how we built the lighting workflow for Mannequin on Quest 2.
Using Lumen and baking the result with GPU Lightmass. Also faking bloom and reflections on low-end hardware, and creating custom tools to keep everything consistent across Q2 and PC.

If you're into technical art, lighting pipelines, or VR optimization, you might enjoy it.

https://real-mrbeam.github.io/2025/10/28/Lighting-Mannequin.html




@qaqelol@toots.niark.nexus avatar qaqelol , to random

My interactive tween guide for Godot is out !

If you have trouble using tweens, adding "Juice" or picking the right transition, it should hopefully help!

The guide is free and will always be 🩵

https://qaqelol.itch.io/tweens

Boost and feedback are really appreciated ✨

Video recording of my interactive tween guide for Godot. 3 pages are quickly shown : Transition and eases, Spawning, Color components.

@h4ckernews@mastodon.social avatar h4ckernews Bot , to random
@qaqelol@toots.niark.nexus avatar qaqelol , to random
@kwramm@mastodon.gamedev.place avatar kwramm , to random

I'm a tech artist. And I find the whole idea of having a dedicated person to "translate between programmers and artists" incredibly stupid.

Not only are you the bottleneck, it also makes the other 2 sides really lazy. Artists feel they don't have to care about tech (cuz that's "programmer stuff") and programmers don't have to care about learning how the things they program are actually used.

It's not agile. It prevents cross team learning. It builds silos - Talk to each other!

@simonschreibt@mastodon.gamedev.place avatar simonschreibt , to random
@h4ckernews@mastodon.social avatar h4ckernews Bot , to random
@h4ckernews@mastodon.social avatar h4ckernews Bot , to random
@h4ckernews@mastodon.social avatar h4ckernews Bot , to random
@h4ckernews@mastodon.social avatar h4ckernews Bot , to random
@haukethiessen@mastodon.gamedev.place avatar haukethiessen , to random

After writing about topics for a while and growing increasingly frustrated with Artstation's blogging tools, I finally moved to WordPress🎉:
https://haukethiessen.com/
All posts so far did survive the move. I'm still getting used to the newfound freedom, adding new features and polishing the new site, so please let me know about any rough spots.

@decompiledart@mastodon.gamedev.place avatar decompiledart , to random Russian

Latest update:
– Multi-mesh rendering support
– CPU-based FPS counter implemented

The renderer’s getting more capable and measurable! 🖥📊

video/mp4

@h4ckernews@mastodon.social avatar h4ckernews Bot , to random
@bitinn@mastodon.gamedev.place avatar bitinn , to random

Dear and engine , can someone point me to a page that actually explain how to get non-correlated channel to compress better under astc?

Say I have a matcap mask texture packed with roughness and metallic for example?

Is there anything we can do better than setting a large channel (component) weight?

The old “-mask” command just don’t work well with latest astcenc.

@h4ckernews@mastodon.social avatar h4ckernews Bot , to random
@simonschreibt@mastodon.gamedev.place avatar simonschreibt , to random
@FrameOfMind@mastodon.gamedev.place avatar FrameOfMind , to random

Okay recently we discussed how to create an efficient escalator geometry, but what about animating it?

Of course you can always just send a bunch of stairs along a spine, but I didn't like that. First of all: a bunch of objects running on a loop seems like a bit of a hassle and also a waste of draw-calls.

So as I was expecting to do a lot of math anyways, I wanted to just do it properly.

https://mastodon.gamedev.place/@FrameOfMind/114059253644027389

Escalator steps escalating viewed from the side in a game engine. You can see the hind edge of one stairs top coast along the bottom edge of another stairs curved front as the escalator transitions from flat to stair.

@simonschreibt@mastodon.gamedev.place avatar simonschreibt , to random

A look behind the scenes of the mirrors in Sims 4, how efficient they cull objects and that they reflect invisible walls: https://simonschreibt.de/gat/sims-4-mirrors/

ALT
@simonschreibt@mastodon.gamedev.place avatar simonschreibt , to random

My new article is about how different types of shoes can affect game development and how games deal with this in practice: https://simonschreibt.de/gat/the-high-heel-problem/

ALT
@DavitMasia@mastodon.gamedev.place avatar DavitMasia , to random

Due procedural textures lacks of mipmaps, how to fix them in the material? Is to avoid in far view looks noisy.

All without use the TextureSample/Texture object trick.

Any idea?