iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Reposted by Karl

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 · 13/04/2026

Right, it's one of the typical inputs of PBR materials. The RGB values in normal maps represent the XYZ components of 3D vectors for adding extra detail during the shading step. The vector/color (0.5, 0.5, 1.0) represents "flat", which is why these maps usually have a somewhat purple appearance.

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Karl @hexaquo.at · 13/04/2026

I haven't noticed any problems with zero alpha pixels, what exactly are you running into? I did notice that our normal maps are often very transparent for some reason, but alpha is ultimately ignored there anyways. Unfortunately not, I already had two work appointments on those exact dates :(

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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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Reposted by Karl

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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Karl @hexaquo.at · 20/02/2026

I feel you! looks great!

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Reposted by Karl

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 · 11/01/2026

Nice! the per-streak chromatic fade looks really stylish! very happy to hear that my repo helped :)

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Karl @hexaquo.at · 08/01/2026

Thanks! glad it helped :) The streaks are mostly adapted from here: chrisoat.com/papers/Oat-S... my code for doing multiple passes with it is a bit messy because of the texture ping-pong-ing, not sure if there's a better way to do that. Thanks, I want to extend and post that other scene sometime!

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Karl @hexaquo.at · 08/01/2026

Yes! they're all created procedurally from the HDR buffer. for this glare effect, I do multiple passes of a directional blur.

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Karl @hexaquo.at · 08/01/2026

Thanks, yeah feel free to take any code that's useful! I can get some nice anamorphic glare with the right settings; if you also want to stretch the lens flare ghosts, you could probably apply the glare blur filter (streak.glsl in my repo) to the buffer used for the ghosts. (or just warp the UVs)

Screenshot of the Godot editor with the sun producing a strong horizontal anamorphic glare. To the right, the corresponding settings are visible under the "Glare" tab": Streak count 2, attenuation 0.992, samples 6

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Karl @hexaquo.at · 08/01/2026

The procedural lens flare and glare effect is open source, if someone wants to give it a try: github.com/kb173/godot-...

github.com

GitHub - kb173/godot-procedural-lens-flare

Contribute to kb173/godot-procedural-lens-flare development by creating an account on GitHub.

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Karl @hexaquo.at · 31/12/2025

Really cool stuff! How is your action library licensed? I saw the code on your gitea instance, but didn't see a license there.

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Karl @hexaquo.at · 29/12/2025

Yeah I think that approach definitely makes more sense for some projects! My original intention with this was mainly to communicate brightness better, that's why I went for the color buffer approach. (Though I'd also like to try it in a really stylized environment, dark with lots of glowing objects)

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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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Reposted by Karl

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 · 25/12/2025

please do! (but maybe wait a few more days until it's a bit more usable and the most obvious performance issues are fixed)

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Karl @hexaquo.at · 23/12/2025

and I feel you, figuring out how to get the texture into my compositor effect shader took me way too long 😅

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Karl @hexaquo.at · 23/12/2025

True, it's hard to dial in & you need to make sure that things like the sun are actually bright (i.e. write values far above 1.0 into the color buffer). Also made me realize how most of the default settings don't care about this at all; even with physical light units, the sun disk isn't very bright.

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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 · 20/12/2025

Looks great! I'd be very interested in a deep-dive into the tricks you're probably doing to deal with floating-point accuracy :)

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Karl @hexaquo.at · 19/12/2025

I tested it real quick and this works for me: varying float random_offset; void vertex() { random_offset = (MODEL_MATRIX * vec4(0.0, 0.0, 0.0, 1.0)).y; } void fragment() { [...] float final_speed = TIME * (speed / 4.0) + random_offset; [...] }

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Karl @hexaquo.at · 19/12/2025

also, I haven't used canvas_item shaders much, but it seems like the self_modulate property is passed into the COLOR variable of the shader; perhaps that could also be used to pass a random offset from GDScript into the shader without a uniform? I think the position hash would be preferable though

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Karl @hexaquo.at · 19/12/2025

We usually hash the object position for pseudo-random offsets like that. e.g.: float rand(vec3 co){ return fract(sin(dot(co ,vec3(12.9898,78.233,54.1463))) * 43758.5453); } Perhaps you could do that using the object's translation, i.e. MODEL_MATRIX * vec3(0.0, 0.0, 0.0, 1.0)?

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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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Reposted by Karl

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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Karl @hexaquo.at · 14/12/2025

I was confused by this as well, but I guess it's consistent, since e.g. frame time will unavoidably also count gizmos. imo this panel is good for testing individual effects (turn them invisible/visible, check the difference), but I think testing entire scenes should generally be done in game mode.

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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 · 05/12/2025

If you end up with any specific questions, let me know!

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Karl @hexaquo.at · 05/12/2025

I don't think you can get it to look that clean with the subdivided-mesh approach (and it'd get really inefficient). I wrote a bit about geometry-based grass in Godot here, maybe that can give some inspiration: hexaquo.at/pages/grass-... no geometry shader needed, just normal high-level Godot stuff!

hexaquo.at

Grass Rendering Series Part 2: Full-Geometry Grass in Godot

In this second part of the Grass Rendering series, we’ll go over one possible implementation of grass in Godot. It will be full-geometry grass, meaning that each grass blade is an actual 3D object. Th...

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Karl @hexaquo.at · 01/12/2025

Oh nice! I think I caught a glimpse of an orthographic camera up there, are you rendering the clouds to a separate texture and rendering that texture to the shadow pass (with some alpha threshold)?

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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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Karl @hexaquo.at · 24/11/2025

Fun sidenote: Resource.duplicate takes a bool for whether it should do a deep-copy. Since bools and ints are compatible, duplicate(true) is valid for both Nodes and Resources, but does not actually do a deep-copy for Nodes since 1 is just the DUPLICATE_SIGNALS flag. Had a fun bug caused by that once

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Reposted by Karl

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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