iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Hillsguy @hillsguy.bsky.social · 11/09/2026

Spent 3 days on my first low-poly car 3D model, a 1994 Toyota Supra MK4, made in #b3d 392 tris (excluding the shadow plane), 128x128 texture (again, excluding the shadow)

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Hillsguy @hillsguy.bsky.social · 23/08/2026

Vertex color baking again 1. Point sampling (current implementation in #b3d 5.2) 2. Least squares 3. Least squares + edge-based regularization with alpha = 0.1 4. Raytraced result

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Hillsguy @hillsguy.bsky.social · 19/08/2026

Experimenting with vertex color baking in #b3d Point sampling (current implementation in Blender 5.2) vs weighted average vs least squares vs raytraced reference

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Hillsguy @hillsguy.bsky.social · 23/07/2026

Came up with a cursed workaround to avoid light leaking when baking lightmaps in #b3d, but it multiplies render time by 2x 😩

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Hillsguy @hillsguy.bsky.social · 03/07/2026

Enjoy our new walking simulator / virtual gallery made with Moonisland for #soupjam2026

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Hillsguy @hillsguy.bsky.social · 23/06/2026

Working on a small #SOUPJAM2026 entry, stay tuned

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Hillsguy @hillsguy.bsky.social · 15/06/2026

Released my proof of concept BC1 encoder for channel packed textures on github! I hope that bc7enc and icbc developers will consider paying more attention to channel packed textures in the future. 🙂

github.com

GitHub - rmn20/dxt_cpt: BC1 encoder for channel packed textures

BC1 encoder for channel packed textures. Contribute to rmn20/dxt_cpt development by creating an account on GitHub.

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Hillsguy @hillsguy.bsky.social · 09/06/2026

Downloaded 763 1k ARM textures from polyhaven and tested b7enc and my encoder (with 4x4 principal axis) using SSIM, RMSE and LPIPS I used L5 bc7enc mode as L18 is too slow and L5 seems to be closer to my encoder under the hood So my encoder seems to score better only on LPIPS...

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Hillsguy @hillsguy.bsky.social · 05/06/2026

Found another heuristic for improving visual quality of BC1 textures with channel packing. The idea is to calculate principal axis using pixels from the adjacent blocks. This essentially blurs hue and can reduce detail of channels parallel to PA, but this also reduces artifacts on block boundaries.

Red, green and blue channels of bc7enc, experimental encoder with PA calculated using 4x4 and 6x6 blocks

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Hillsguy @hillsguy.bsky.social · 02/06/2026

Experimenting with S3TC/BC1/DXT1 compression. The idea is to intentionally leak channel data into each other to reduce blockiness and get at least some data instead of averaged out 4x4 blocks.

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Hillsguy @hillsguy.bsky.social · 30/05/2026

raytraced reference vs normal map + bent normals and ao for self-shadowing + separate bent normals and ao texture for light bounce 🤔

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Hillsguy @hillsguy.bsky.social · 26/05/2026

Came up with a cursed workaround for baking bent normals purely in Blender 3D using the raycast shader node. Bent normals are usually used for self-shadowing and reflection occlusion. 1. Regular normal map 2. Normal map + raytraced shadows 3. Normal map + bent normal map #b3d

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Hillsguy @hillsguy.bsky.social · 20/05/2026

Found a nice way to visualize and debug directional lighting data Again, raytraced reference vs per-channel RGB AHD lightmap

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Hillsguy @hillsguy.bsky.social · 08/05/2026

Ray-traced reference vs spherical harmonics (L0+L1) 1024x lightmap vs per-channel AHD (dominant direction) irradz 1024x lightmap I can barely see any difference...

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Hillsguy @hillsguy.bsky.social · 04/05/2026

Currently trying various workarounds for baking directional lightmaps in #Blender 3D. Ray-traced result vs 1024x1024 lightmap with directional information stored as spherical harmonics. #gamedev

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Hillsguy @hillsguy.bsky.social · 29/04/2026

Glass refraction & reflection using simple parallax corrected cubemaps. No screen space effects, no RT #gamedev #indiedev

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Hillsguy @hillsguy.bsky.social · 24/04/2026

1024x HDR texture + 1024x LDR distance texture = 😐 #gamedev #indiedev

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Hillsguy @hillsguy.bsky.social · 27/03/2026

Trying to approximate flashlight in M3G (~OpenGL ES 1.1) 1. Disable all scene lights, enable omni light at player position 2. Render the scene 3. Render flat 2D flashlight mask 4. Disable flashlight omni light, enable other scene lights 5. Render the scene again using additive blending 6. Voila?

This is how scene looks like with scene lights enabled but without flashlight

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Hillsguy @hillsguy.bsky.social · 13/02/2026

Spent my whole January working on a new MascotCapsule v3 implementation in pure MIDP 2.0 Now you can run games previously exclusive to Sony Ericsson phones on any powerful enough J2ME cellphone or easily add MCv3 support to your J2ME emulator without worrying about OpenGL/ES support

Don't look at Nokia N70 and Samsung Champ, they are too slow for this

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Hillsguy @hillsguy.bsky.social · 13/01/2026

So, it turns out, to achieve good looking caustics in Blender with Cycles you need to disable "filter gloss" option and NOT use "cast/receive shadow caustics" options

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Hillsguy @hillsguy.bsky.social · 29/10/2025

Silent Hill 4 uses interesting volumetric light / light glare approximation. Instead of drawing sprites at each light source, full-screen subdivided plane with procedural vertex colors is rendered and blended with game frame. #gamedev

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Hillsguy @hillsguy.bsky.social · 03/10/2025

Does anyone know how Climax Studios implemented shadow maps on PS2 and PSP in Silent Hill: Origins and Shattered Memories?

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Hillsguy @hillsguy.bsky.social · 11/09/2025

Got bizarre dream bazaar to work with portmaster Not quite butter smooth, but it works

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Hillsguy @hillsguy.bsky.social · 03/08/2025

Was wondering why vertex lighting looks ugly in linear RGB compared to sRGB Turns out it's due to interpolation in linear color space. Interpolating sqrt(col) fixes the issue I also tried sqrt(1/col) but it looks wrong on smooth normals I wonder if this can be applied to lightmaps too

Vertex lighting in linear RGB with sqrt(col) interpolation

Vertex lighting in linear RGB with sqrt(1/col) interpolation (I use invsqr distance attenuation)

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Hillsguy @hillsguy.bsky.social · 25/07/2025

Experimenting with normals for spherical environment mapping #gamedev #indiedev

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Reposted by Hillsguy

Matthew Wilde @skilful.bsky.social · 13/06/2025

This is a great thread @hillsguy.bsky.social, I'll add a bit more context here for anyone interested. Yes there's no fancy sim - it just uses a water interaction buffer as a target for the particle system rendering, so we could use the power of particle system we already have.

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Hillsguy @hillsguy.bsky.social · 11/06/2025

Decided to check out how water is rendered in Counter-Strike 2. Given how interactive water in CS2 is, I expected to see some cellular fluid simulation, but turns out they just use a low-resolution off-screen buffer with flat 2D decals used for various aspects of water. Reminds me of HL2 water :)

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Hillsguy @hillsguy.bsky.social · 02/05/2025

Made cloth physics using compute shaders in webgpu as a test assignment for a job. Got rejected anyway. Well, anyways, at least I implemented cloth physics for the first time and tried out new graphics API...

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Hillsguy @hillsguy.bsky.social · 26/04/2025

Attempt to approximate light sampling from surface area to smooth out the vertex lighting a bit. It kinda works, but I was expecting polygonal mesh structure visible due to vertex lighting to disappear, but it didn't... off / 1.414 units disk radius / 2 units disk radius #gamedev #indiedev

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Hillsguy @hillsguy.bsky.social · 15/04/2025

Experimenting with AO and normal map calculation from height map in shader #gamedev #indiedev

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Hillsguy @hillsguy.bsky.social · 20/02/2025

Probably many of you have heard about palette swapping (and also palette cycling), which old games (up to PlayStation 2) utilized to to add visual variety without consuming too much VRAM

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Hillsguy @hillsguy.bsky.social · 25/01/2025

Random fact: Coraline's mother's laptop is based on some old thinkpad

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Hillsguy @hillsguy.bsky.social · 21/01/2025

Worked on the Nintendo DS version of ClassiCube a few days ago a bit. It's still not very playable, but at least it's a bit faster and better looking than it was. #homebrew #indiedev

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Hillsguy @hillsguy.bsky.social · 25/12/2024

Finally added simplified frustum culling to my potentially visible set calculation program Now processing this map (328 meshes, 217 tris) takes 48 sec on my 1660 ti, previously it was 130 sec I render 8 256x cubemaps per cell and fill vis grid using DDA in compute shader #gamedev #indiedev #raylib

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Hillsguy @hillsguy.bsky.social · 20/11/2024

Trying to deobfuscate/refactor STALKER Mobile 3D (J2ME) object loading code

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Hillsguy @hillsguy.bsky.social · 23/10/2024

Yume Nikki (ゆめにっき) (2004)

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