iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

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Adriaan @adriaan.games · 16/09/2026

We optimized draw calls by 99% (lol) in Hidden Folks 2 by writing some tools to find all textures used in a level, generate a level-specific atlas, and replace individual texture references with atlas textures. Thread below 🧵👇🏼 #godotengine

Two side-by-side screenshots showing before and after we applied a texture atlas optimization to our game Hidden Folks two, the before showing 13318 draw calls and the after showing 113 draw calls

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Ryan Moulton @moultano.bsky.social · 19/06/2026

I spent the last month obsessed with finding colors that can't be displayed on a conventional screen. This is what I found. moultano.wordpress.com/2026/06/19/w...

moultano.wordpress.com

Where to Find the Colors Your Screen Can’t Show You

An atlas of the vibrance of the real world

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Antonio Caggiano @antoniocaggiano.eu · 12/06/2026

For anyone who couldn't make it to GodotCon, the recording of my talk "Integrating Vulkan Ray Tracing in Godot" is now up on YouTube! #Godot #Vulkan #RayTracing

youtube.com

Integrating Vulkan Ray Tracing in Godot – Antonio Caggiano – GodotCon 2026

YouTube video by Godot Engine

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nicebyte @nicebyte.bsky.social · 12/04/2026

INTRODUCTION TO SPHERICAL HARMONICS FOR GRAPHICS PROGRAMMERS finally done. gpfault.net/posts/sph.html

gpfault.net

Introduction to Spherical Harmonics for Graphics Programmers

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Karl @hexaquo.at · 12/04/2026

Did you know you can set up a scene and render it to a texture without any nodes in #Godot, by directly using the RenderingServer? We automatically generate billboard sprites for meshes this way. There's not much info about the RenderingServer online, so I wrote about it: hexaquo.at/pages/using-...

a 3D tree asset on the left, with an arrow pointing to spritesheets on the right. The spritesheets contain 2 albedo sprites (front and side) and 2 normal sprites (also front and side).

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Victoria Rose Richards @aerialembroidery.bsky.social · 09/04/2026

'A simple (perfect) life' - my spring landscape is finally finished! An apple orchard in bloom, old railway, sheep with their lambs and an allotment being prepared for growing :) Zoom in to see all the other tiny details too... I think this might be my favourite aerial embroidery I've ever done!

An embroidery hoop containing a sewn aerial view landscape. It depicts an apple orchard in bloom in the centre, allotments to the left and sheep in their field at the bottom. Train tracks go past the top of the orchard and allotment.

Sewn train tracks past an apple orchard (to the left).

An angled view of a sewn vegetable allotment surrounded by rough land, trees and with train tracks to the left.

An angled view of embroidered bushes and paths going through them leading to an orchard, allotment and fields.

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Karl @hexaquo.at · 24/03/2026

Implemented a variable-density Poisson disk sampler as a C++ GDExtension for #Godot: github.com/boku-ilen/go... It generates random points with a variable density, based on e.g. an image. should be very useful for scattering vegetation. based on this article: www.vertexfragment.com/ramblings/va...

the Godot icon, but it is depicted via randomly placed white dots with variable density. a higher density of dots causes the image to look brighter there, thus making the general contrast of the Godot robot head visible.

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goosegardenstd.bsky.social @goosegardenstd.bsky.social · 14/03/2026

I just open-sourced a real-time datamosh CompositorEffect for Godot 4.4+ using motion vectors and temporal accumulation. Demo scene and presets included. github.com/goosegarden/... #Godot #gamedev

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Jendrik Illner @jendrikillner.bsky.social · 15/01/2026

Graphics Programming weekly - Issue 423 - January 11th, 2026 www.jendrikillner.com/post/graphic...

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Karl @hexaquo.at · 29/12/2025

Lens Flare update: exposed all configurable parameters now. There's probably still a lot of potential for performance optimization, but I'd say it's somewhat usable :) You can check it out here, should work in any project (though requires some HDR care): github.com/kb173/godot-... #Godot #gamedev

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LaurieWired @lauriewired.bsky.social · 23/12/2025

Gaussian splats are quite the rage lately (for good reason). Yet the technique is actually quite old!  35 years ago, Lee Westover created the worlds first splat with the “UNC Head” dataset. A high-res CT scan...much too detailed for computers at the time.

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Karl @hexaquo.at · 23/12/2025

If you want your #Godot game to look like Battlefield 3, I got you

Screenshot of a Godot scene with a blue sky and the sun visible through a large window in a concrete structure. The sun (and a reflection of the sun on the concrete) have a strong glare with 6 light streaks going outwards. There is also a lens flare effect with chromatic aberration, and the bloom uses a lens dirt texture to create large circular patterns of higher brightness (like dust on a lens).

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Karl @hexaquo.at · 18/12/2025

More work on procedural lens flares in #Godot. If you want to have a look at the (still very messy!) code: github.com/kb173/godot-... Outline of how it works: 1. Clip bright spots from the rendered image 2. Warp these spots to create ghosts and a halo 3. Blur 4. Overlay based on a dirt texture

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Sebastian Aaltonen @sebaaltonen.bsky.social · 16/12/2025

My "No Graphics API" blog post is live! Please repost :) www.sebastianaaltonen.com/blog/no-grap... I spend 1.5 years doing this. Full rewrite last summer and another partial rewrite last month. As Hemingway said: "First draft of everything is always shit".

sebastianaaltonen.com

No Graphics API — Sebastian Aaltonen

Graphics APIs and shader languages have significantly increased in complexity over the past decade. It’s time to start discussing how to strip down the abstractions to simplify development, improve pe...

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Karl @hexaquo.at · 16/12/2025

Finally learning CompositorEffects #Godot Lens flare based on this blog: john-chapman-graphics.blogspot.com/2013/02/pseu...

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Jendrik Illner @jendrikillner.bsky.social · 08/12/2025

Graphics Programming weekly - Issue 419 - December 7th, 2025 www.jendrikillner.com/post/graphic...

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Cécile Muller @wildpeaks.fr · 03/12/2025

Good idea using gaussians for tiled floor vegetation: yunfan.zone/gswt_webpage/ #3dgs #gamedev #rendering

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Karl @hexaquo.at · 26/11/2025

I often talk about bent normals for billboards, and I keep having to mention the "if (!FRONT_FACING) NORMAL = -NORMAL" workaround for correct backface lighting. I realized I could fix that myself, so I opened a PR for an intuitive material option and render_mode: github.com/godotengine/... #Godot

Left: a plane and a sphere with billboards scattered on it. A text below says "Default", and some billboards are noticeably darker than the others.
Right: the same plane and sphere with billboards, but with smooth lighting without the dark billboards. The text below says "Keep Backface Normals".

Schematic drawing. Left, titled "Original normals, matching geometry": a plane with an arrow pointing orthogonally outwards to the right, saying "original normal", and an arrow pointing into the opposite direction, saying "default behavior: flipped normal". Right, titled "Custom normals, do not match geometry": a plane with an arrow pointing straight up, parallel to the plane, saying "original normal", and the same arrow again, saying "intended backface normal". Another arrow points straight down, saying "default behavior: flipped normal".

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Andrew Willmott @andrewwillmott.bsky.social · 18/11/2025

I don't understand how they could get (?:(?:\"|'|\]|\}|\\|\d|(?:nan|infinity|true|false|null|undefined|symbol|math)|\`|\-|\+)+[)]*;?((?:\s|-|~|!|{}|\|\||\+)*.*(?:.*=.*))) so wrong

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Karl @hexaquo.at · 13/11/2025

On my way home from #GodotFest. Thanks so much to everyone for this incredible event! Hope to see you all again soon :) My presentation on foliage rendering in #Godot is already up on YouTube: www.youtube.com/watch?v=U2nB... And I also shared my slides here: slides.com/hexaquo/plan...

youtube.com

Karl Bittner: Plants, Polygons and Pixels: Large-Scale Vegetation Rendering in Godot #GodotFest2025

YouTube video by GodotFest

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Robin-Yann Storm @rystorm.com · 11/11/2025

I’m now seeing a talk about large scale vegetation rendering in Godot, by Karl Bittner. He mentions there is an open source alternative to speedtree, which he has barely heard mentioned: EZ tree: www.eztree.dev It even has an in-browser 3D viewer in which you can try different seeds for the trees!

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Karl @hexaquo.at · 10/11/2025

on my way to #GodotFest! hope to meet some of you there :)

Laptop on a desk in a train next to a window. A presentation is being edited on the laptop. Outside the window are houses and hills lit by sunset.

View out of the train window. A church can be seen on a nearby hill, which is otherwise covered by forest.

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Fabrizio Espindola @fabrizioespindola.bsky.social · 08/11/2025

The easiest way to create action lines in a shader is to take some noise and convert its UVs to polar coordinates 🙂 #godot #indiedev #gamedev

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Karl @hexaquo.at · 21/10/2025

🔜 #GodotFest Want to see these slides (and many more) live? Then join my presentation on November 11th at GodotFest in Munich :) #godot #gamedev

Presentation slide with the text "Plants, Polygons and Pixels: Large-Scale Vegetation Rendering in Godot". The background is a slightly blurred view over a rendered landscape.

Presentation slide with the text "Geometry versus Billboards". "Geometry" is bold. On the right, a highly detailed 3D model of a tree is shown, first rendered, then shaded in white to show the intricate geometry.

Presentation slide with the text "bend your normals!" and two rendered trees. The tree on the right has a clearer canopy shape due to smoother lighting. An arrow points from the left to the right tree.

Presentation slide with the text "Ground-Covering Billboard Clouds" and an image of a rendered landscape. In the right half of the rendering, the plant billboards are rendered as white quads in order to show the geometry.

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Jendrik Illner @jendrikillner.bsky.social · 20/10/2025

Graphics Programming weekly - Issue 413 - October 19th, 2025 www.jendrikillner.com/post/graphic...

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Man in Business Suit Levitating @dfeldman.org · 14/10/2025

Can you actually tell the difference between lossless and lossy compressed audio? (With your current headphones/speakers and ears) abx.digitalfeed.net/list.html

abx.digitalfeed.net

ABX High Fidelity Test list

A set of browser-based ABX tests comparing lossless and lossy music samples

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Kelvin van Hoorn | wishlist Oniros! @kelvinvanhoorn.com · 09/10/2025

Trying out 2 different approaches to leaf rendering on trees. The first is a custom mesh, where each quad of the mesh is extended along the normals. The second is are multimeshes of quads, where the normal is based on the vertex position relative to the center of the multimesh. #GodotEngine

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Jendrik Illner @jendrikillner.bsky.social · 07/10/2025

Graphics Programming weekly - Issue 411 - October 5th, 2025 www.jendrikillner.com/post/graphic...

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Roland Meyer @bildoperationen.bsky.social · 07/10/2025

So-called #genAI means the abolition of the future through the proliferation of endless streams of stochastically rendered generic pasts. Having turned large parts of the cultural archive into training data, it now traps us in a foreverized pastness, a 24/7 nostalgia for a past that never existed

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themaister.bsky.social @themaister.bsky.social · 05/10/2025

New blog post: Outlining an alternative path to learn graphics programming. themaister.net/blog/2025/10...

themaister.net

A case for learning GPU programming with a compute-first mindset – Maister's Graphics Adventures

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Yining Karl Li @yiningkarlli.bsky.social · 02/10/2025

In light of EA's upcoming change of ownership... here's your annual reminder that Will Wright's original GDC 2005 demo of Spore was one of the most incredible game demos every presented, before the game was utterly and totally ruined by EA's meddling. www.youtube.com/watch?v=ofA6...

youtube.com

Will Wright GDC 2005 Spore (The Future of Content) Remastered

YouTube video by Zeusmonomon

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Scott Anderson @impossible.bsky.social · 03/10/2025

This is not only introducing a new approach to OIT, but it's a comprehensive overview of various OIT techniques and a history of transparency in COD. One thing that seems to be missing is CPU-side depth sorted transparency, which I implemented in SHG's COD branch and IIRC Treyarch had also

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Kelvin van Hoorn | wishlist Oniros! @kelvinvanhoorn.com · 01/10/2025

It sure is windy here 🍃 Rendering is based on this great tutorial (hexaquo.at/pages/grass-...) by @hexaquo.at Placement is done with ProtonScatter (github.com/HungryProton...) by @hungryproton.bsky.social #GodotEngine #IndieDev #shader #grass #rendering

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Jendrik Illner @jendrikillner.bsky.social · 15/09/2025

Graphics Programming weekly - Issue 408 - September 14th, 2025 www.jendrikillner.com/post/graphic...

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GodotFest - GodotCon Europe 26 @godotfest.com · 10/09/2025

Mother nature has created a beautiful place for us. The green and lush forests of the world calm our souls... until we have to render them! Let's hear Karl Bittner's virtual gardening wisdom @ #GodotFest!

Image with text, spotlighting a talk or workshop for GodotFest 2025

Plants, Polygons and Pixels: Large-Scale Vegetation Rendering
A showcase of easy and free workflows for creating 3D assets, the most important shading tricks to get them looking great, and how to use impostors for level-of-detail.
Karl Bittner
hexaquo.at

buy your ticket today: 25.godotfest.com

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Esther Lin @estheroate.bsky.social · 09/09/2025

Every lens leaves a blur signature—a hidden fingerprint in every photo. In our new #TPAMI paper, we show how to learn it fast (5 mins of capture!) with Lens Blur Fields ✨ With it, we can tell apart ‘identical’ phones by their optics, deblur images, and render realistic blurs.

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Rachelf @rachelftech.bsky.social · 29/08/2025

Just posted a new #devlog sharing my process making procedural stained glass windows with dynamic lighting in #Godot! Was cool getting to edit some engine code for the first time to enable this effect! #gamedev

youtube.com

I Modified Godot to Make Procedural Stained Glass

YouTube video by RachelfTech

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Jendrik Illner @jendrikillner.bsky.social · 25/08/2025

Graphics Programming weekly - Issue 405 - August 24th, 2025 www.jendrikillner.com/post/graphic...

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