iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Harry 💬 @halisavakis.com · 27/09/2026

I wonder, have I not made my attitude against genAI clear enough? I swear, I'll just get more and more vulgar with every random genAI-related offer

Mail response reading:

"If you've looked me up and my work before, you'd see that I do not fuck with genAI in any capacity, so I wouldn't like to be involved in any shape or form.

Cheers,
Harry"

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Harry 💬 @halisavakis.com · 18/09/2026

Yeah, I don't think god rays can get any crisper than that 👀 HAZE 1.2.6 will be submitted later today and you'll soon have access to those crispy sun shafts yourself ✨

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Harry 💬 @halisavakis.com · 15/09/2026

A common complaint with HAZE that came from the froxel resolution restrictions was that you couldn't really get crisp enough god rays; so next update will feature an optional additive pass for crisp raymarched god rays ✨ Implementing this illustrated the need for a refactor at some point tho 🙃

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Harry 💬 @halisavakis.com · 15/09/2026

Probably not the most elegant approach, but it should do the trick! Try adding those 2 lines in the HazeComposite.shader file and the skybox should get masked out

Code snippet with highlighted additions to make HAZE mask out the skybox during the composition. Added lines are marked with an arrow.

--> real4 orColor = color;
color = lerp(color, half4(bloomTex.rgb,1) * (1 / _HazeBlurRadius), _HazeBloomIntensity * (1.0 - scatterBuffer.a));
color.rgb = color.rgb * lerp(scatterBuffer.a, 1, _HazeBloomIntensity) + scatterBuffer.rgb;
--> color.rgb = lerp(orColor.rgb, color.rgb, step(FLT_EPS, depth));

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Harry 💬 @halisavakis.com · 11/09/2026

Another attempt at a stylized material using similar approaches; it's probably too noisy to actually be useful, but I had fun wrangling it either way ✨

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Harry 💬 @halisavakis.com · 09/09/2026

Took a page out of @makkon.bsky.social 's book and tried my hand at some painterly material work in Substance Designer 🪨 Can't say I expected it to turn out that well, there's a *high* possibility I'm gonna be abusing this approach 👀

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Harry 💬 @halisavakis.com · 05/09/2026

Still very volumetric and very traversable ☁️ Currently 1ms for the whole thing on my 4080 super

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Harry 💬 @halisavakis.com · 05/09/2026

Getting much happier with the cloud coverage now; it's independent of the camera's far clip plane and is now using a hemisphere volume instead of a box one, which for some reason feels more accurate 🌍 #gamedev #unity3d #madewithunity

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Harry 💬 @halisavakis.com · 01/09/2026

Finally got our wedding photos, so here's the official photo dump from various stages of our wedding week from June ✨ Seems like it was just yesterday and 5 years ago at the same time 😅

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Harry 💬 @halisavakis.com · 30/08/2026

Streamlined the shadow cookie stuff a bit and exposed more properties around the fog, which seems to make all the difference ☁️ I'm not too happy with how the clouds just stop in the distance, but I'm pretty content with the usability and visual results for now ✨ #gamedev #unity3d #madewithunity

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Harry 💬 @halisavakis.com · 31/07/2026

No need to use your imagination anymore, cloud shadows are now accurate ✨ It's such a silly approach and I can't believe it worked, I giggled so much when I got it working

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Harry 💬 @halisavakis.com · 30/07/2026

Finally, there's a hefty layer of post-processing that includes a depth/normal-based edge-detection outline effect, along with plenty of bloom and other color-modifying effects that I was tweaking like a mad person to make this look more anime ✨ Hope this helps!

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Harry 💬 @halisavakis.com · 30/07/2026

Another view of the broth shader; the shiny specular come from a normal map also sampled in polar coordinates that only affects specular reflections

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Harry 💬 @halisavakis.com · 30/07/2026

The broth is just a stylized water shader with depth-intersection effects for both the emissive outline around the objects and the depth-based color interpolation. Noise textures are sampled and panned in polar coordinates

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Harry 💬 @halisavakis.com · 30/07/2026

Most elements had a quite dense topology to maintain the shapes and not give any 3D-ness away, and they were all shaded with a slightly modified version of my cel-shaded surface shader shown here: halisavakis.com/my-take-on-s...

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Harry 💬 @halisavakis.com · 30/07/2026

I was asked about a small breakdown for the 3D anime ramen and realized my breakdown thread was on the cursed site from which I deleted my account 😅 So I'm gonna post a small 🧵 here

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Harry 💬 @halisavakis.com · 28/07/2026

Cool thing with the compute shader approach is that I can also hijack the cloud raymarching loop to chuck in some volumetric fog in a different buffer with barely any additional computational cost ✨ Now try to imagine how cooler this would look if those cloud shadows were actually accurate 👀

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Harry 💬 @halisavakis.com · 27/07/2026

it's always a nice bonus to know that at any point you can just like, go swimming in the clouds 🏊

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Harry 💬 @halisavakis.com · 27/07/2026

Quick tip if you're working with clouds: put them in the scene to contextualize them, cause otherwise you'll drive yourself mad thinking you've made the worst looking clouds in the history of rendering That being said, I guess I like how these clouds look ☁️ #gamedev #madewithunity

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Harry 💬 @halisavakis.com · 25/07/2026

Thanks Luke! It can probably get much closer to that effect too with some tweaks, there are quite a few sliders 👀

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Harry 💬 @halisavakis.com · 25/07/2026

Slightly unrelated but still fun to show; check out dat performance 👀 That's a cloud volume that spans 3000x2000x3000 world units filled with thick fluffy clouds raymarched at minimum 8 units per step and rendered in a quarter res buffer Whole scene averages at 1.5ms (on a 4080 super, but still)

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Harry 💬 @halisavakis.com · 25/07/2026

Turns out that a big part of cloud rendering is also the authoring, cause procedural noises can only get you so far ☁️ Trying some stuff out with simple shape volumes that add/remove density, but what other method of cloudscape authoring would you like to see? 👀 #gamedev #unity3d #madewithunity

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Harry 💬 @halisavakis.com · 10/06/2026

✨HAZE is, once again, 50% off as part of the Unity Summer Sale! ✨ If you wanna add some more atmosphere to your game with a performant and flexible volumetric fog solution, now's your chance to do it 😶‍🌫️ 🔗: assetstore.unity.com/packages/vfx...

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Harry 💬 @halisavakis.com · 05/06/2026

Not shading too many pixels these days, I'm busy marrying my best friend ✨

Me in a suit next to my wife (Borat voice) in a beautiful dream-like lilac gown descending the stairs of the Athens city hall

Selfie of me in a vest and tie next to my wife (Borat voice) in a beautiful dream-like lilac gown sitting on our couch with a blur of a goblin cat on her lap

Selfie of me and my wife (Borat voice) in a beautiful dream-like lilac gown sitting next to our couch with our cat sniffing my wife's (Borat voice) nose

Me in a suit next to my wife (Borat voice) in a beautiful dream-like lilac gown, holding a beautiful bouquet of flowers outside the Athens city hall

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Harry 💬 @halisavakis.com · 02/06/2026

I went from thinking left screenshot was "visually appealing" on the first game jam entry I participated in 2014 to scenes like the one on the right screenshot and I'd do it all again without taking any shortcuts cause that's how I got where I am. I wish kids getting into gamedev took this route too

Screenshot of a junky af web game with incredibly bright colors and awful gradients, showcasing a 2D side-view of a game with a zebra chained on a rocket.

3D atmospheric scene inspired by Silent Hill f, showing a foggy abandoned Japanese alley with a bunch of red foliage scattered around

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Harry 💬 @halisavakis.com · 02/06/2026

Saw this in a recent Unity short vid and damn that's more depressing than it should be I remember first year in uni I would *drool* every time there was any sort of workshop or event around gamedev and Unity so I could learn how to do that stuff.

Screenshot from a Unity AI demo showing a user-written prompt saying: Create a working game in Unity. It should be a word guess game. Two letters of the word should be displayed, the rest are hidden. There should be an entry field for the user to type in a letter of their choice. If the letter matches a hidden letter in the word, it appears in the word. If the letter is not present the player looses a life. The player has 3 lives. When they run out of lives it is game over. If the player wins by revealing all the hidden letters in the word, the player gets an extra life. A new random word is then chosen. It should look visually appealing, suitable for a desktop game.

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Harry 💬 @halisavakis.com · 13/05/2026

The scene is mostly made of Megascan assets and materials You can flip through the screenshots to check out how HAZE and postprocessing affects the overall scene. Will definitely play around with different lighting setups and potentially record the process for people interested in how I use HAZE ✨

Same scene as before, with HAZE and postprocessing.

Same scene as before, with post-processing but without HAZE

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Harry 💬 @halisavakis.com · 13/05/2026

Very inspired by FROM and Elliott McSherry's work, I set up this little playground scene to test out lighting setups, mostly using HAZE ✨ Calling this "The 3 Church Village" cause their losses were so immeasurable they had to build more churches to protect them. #unity3d #madewithunity #gamedev

Unity 3D scene showing a foggy scene set on a rural field. 3 Churches can be seen to the left, center and right of the camera, with the further one in the center being more brightly lit. There's a thick layer of fog covering the scene and an immeasurable amount of makeshift tombs can be seen covering the ground.

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Harry 💬 @halisavakis.com · 30/04/2026

So much potential for cool terrain details with this one if I figure out some tweaks ngl 👀

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Harry 💬 @halisavakis.com · 30/04/2026

Just so I can be productive again, here's my take on the SPOM thing everyone's been talking about 👀 This is all just 3 big quads with megascans materials ✨ And so far: - It's slow af 🐌 - Doesn't cast proper shadows - No I won't zoom in, I'm a coward #gamedev #untiy3d #madewithunity

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Harry 💬 @halisavakis.com · 20/04/2026

Multi-camera support is coming to HAZE in the next update along with some other minor changes that will add another bit of boost in performance 👀 HAZE is still 50% as part of the Unity Spring Sale! 🔗: assetstore.unity.com/packages/vfx...

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Harry 💬 @halisavakis.com · 16/04/2026

This is the work of a single local volume, that's doing quite a bit of heavy lifting 👀

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Harry 💬 @halisavakis.com · 16/04/2026

I'm planning on making some videos to showcase how HAZE can be set up for different environment scenarios I wasn't too happy with this, though, it's pretty obvious I got bored of finding quick ways to add foliage 😅 But HAZE is doing quite a bit of work here, so I thought I'd share either way ✨

A generic 3D forest of birch trees, engulfed by fog, rendered inside Unity. Orange sun shafts can be seen coming from the top right, while the rest of the fog has a purple-ish tint. Trees in the distance are blurry from the multiple scattering of the fog.

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Harry 💬 @halisavakis.com · 13/04/2026

HAZE is part of the Unity spring sale and it's once again 50% off! Lots of cool things have been added since the last sale, so if you didn't get a chance to try it out, you can check it out now! ✨ 🔗: assetstore.unity.com/packages/vfx...

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Harry 💬 @halisavakis.com · 13/04/2026

Just got back from @atlanticconf.bsky.social where I talked (for quite a long) about the technical art of Herdling ✨ @lantessara.bsky.social and @whiestar.bsky.social did such a wonderful job setting up this lovely event and, as a bonus, I got to see Galicia for the first time, which kinda slaps 👀

Me in front of the Atlantic Games Conference banner

Me giving a talk with a slide about fur mentioning that my ego is more sense than the talk, which is already more dense than a black hole, referring to my compulsive need to roll my own custom fur solution

Photo of the river in Carballo going through a lush green park

Photo of Castelo de Santo Antón in A Coruña

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Harry 💬 @halisavakis.com · 27/03/2026

HAZE 1.2.0 is now submitted to the asset store 👀 It's gonna be a chunky update, but most of all it introduces much better performance, zero garbage allocation and some bonus visual features including a mode for volumes to override fog settings ✨ Stay tuned, it'll be released quite soon!

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Harry 💬 @halisavakis.com · 21/03/2026

A community member from the Discord server pointed out that someone* from the HAZE team was making the CS do much more unneeded work 😅 That little fix makes a simple scene like this (when using a chonky 256x256x256 froxel buffer) to go from ~30FPS to ~580FPS, which is, like, at least 2 more FPS ✨

HAZE demo scene showcasing volumetric lights, with a stats window open showing it's running at 29FPS. This is before the fix.

HAZE demo scene showcasing volumetric lights, with a stats window open showing it's running at 580FPS. This is after the fix.

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Harry 💬 @halisavakis.com · 20/03/2026

Bonus: nice little procedural tree

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Harry 💬 @halisavakis.com · 20/03/2026

Still very very WIP and the code is the equivalent of a pigsty, but I was very excited to share this cause it's been rattling in my brain since I first thought about DRUID: The 🌿Branch Baker 🌿 A small tool to help you generate branch texture sets to avoid flooding your trees with geometry 🌲

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Harry 💬 @halisavakis.com · 16/03/2026

Dang, the AI will now take the jobs from fans one could hire

The screenshots from that stupid "hire fans lol" tweet with Aloy from the Horizon franchise on the left side with "DLSS 5 OFF" written on the top left corner and the silly yassified version on the right with "DLSS 5 ON" written on top.

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Harry 💬 @halisavakis.com · 14/03/2026

It currently looks like that (turned up for demonstration reasons) I think for the most part it's doing its job, but I'd be definitely interested in looking into multiple pivots too, probably baked into a texture of sorts to allow for an indefinite amount of branches etc 👀

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Harry 💬 @halisavakis.com · 13/03/2026

Finally got something I've always wanted to add: per-vertex baked AO It makes things look much more natural, to the point where I can mainly identify its effect when it's *not* there 👀

Unity scene showing 2 3D trees, a birch(?) tree on the left and a pine tree on the right. They have ambient occlusion baked in their vertices, making the dense areas on the trunk and branches darker.

Unity scene showing 2 3D trees, a birch(?) tree on the left and a pine tree on the right. They lack ambient occlusion baked in their vertices and, therefore, all the branches are lit uniformly, without taking leaf density into account.

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Harry 💬 @halisavakis.com · 12/03/2026

I feel I'll never get a score like that ever again after the damage this did to my eyes, but ngl, I'm proud I got that score

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Harry 💬 @halisavakis.com · 11/03/2026

Extra glamour shots! These are all from within my very experimental Unity scene, rendered in URP

Closeup screenshot of a 3D procedurally generated ivy with sun light scattered in the leaves

Artsy fartsy closeup screenshot of a 3d procedurally generated pine tree. The camera is very close to the pine needles and the sun light can be seen dancing amongst them.

Bottom view of a 3D generated pine tree and a birch(?) tree with red leaves

Another closeup screenshot of a 3D procedurally generated ivy vine, with the sun light scattering in its leaves.

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Harry 💬 @halisavakis.com · 11/03/2026

It's always nice to see just how much impact a tiny bit of fake SSS can have on your foliage 🌿 Got a lot of ideas for stuff to make for DRUID and I'm happy to report it's going well 👀 #gamedev #unity3d #madewithunity

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Harry 💬 @halisavakis.com · 08/03/2026

Still going strong with my procedural foliage generation tools (codename DRUID) and, ironically, this UI was definitely the hardest thing about this whole endeavor But, if I were you and you liked foliage, I'd be excited about what's to come 👀

A screenshot from Unity editor showing a UI hierarchy of different tree elements (a trunk, branches and leaves)

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Harry 💬 @halisavakis.com · 03/03/2026

This is where I indie dev (and mainly help others indie dev 😅)

Photo of my home workstation, featuring a petrol-colored wall and a wooden standing desk in the front with a big ultra wide screen on top. Various artworks are hanging on the walls. On the left side of the desk there's a display with various nerdy stuff. Above the desk there's a shelf with fake plants and a couple of artbooks from Sable and Control. On the right side of the desk there's a small piece of furniture with the desktop tower on top and an old-timey lamp in front of it.

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