Have been working on various thing including a (hand crafted) engine for the past 7 months with the goal of large forests with highpoly vegetation (around 1M instances * 4M tris in this case). Haven't really been motivated to post on X lately, but I will go into more... detail soon.show more

Beautiful work

Panos! Love your work on the Spartan engine and BeamNG. You and Janos (Wicked engine) have been an inspiration to me for quite a while.

♥️

For a moment I thought it was real and why the stupid walking sound, then I read the description. The sound engine needs a little bit of work, the rest is brilliant.

Jup, I haven't really gotten around sound yet (even though it's pretty important). But once I get to the sound engine I'll make sure it feels authentic with the visuals.

looks absolutely incredible, using tons of custom compute shaders I presume?

Hey Bobbie! Yes, the majority of the renderer is running on the compute pipeline. Since it's largely gpu driven with a vis buffer approach most of the culling and shading work is on compute. Only raster into vis buffer, output and some other effects run on the graphics pipeline.

Outstanding work. And yeah, it's hard to get on X and socialize about your own product sometimes without it feeling like shameless self-patting but you really should continue This is, really and truly, outstanding work.

Thank you for the kind words! I should really try to give more insights into the projects I'm doing, but I also jump around them a lot lol.

Meeeeeeeeeee too hahahaha. I've been doing that for thirteen years now, so I decided about three months ago I was going to focus in and finish my first of three 'mcclure' AAA games hahaha.

Following you since godot foliage demo, incredible work.

Thank you :) There's more to come.

Very cool, doing something similar with webgl but too many limits with chrome. What are you building it in?

throw dlss5 on it

Doubt my hardware could run it :) The goal is to make it somewhat believable without relying on dlss 5 first. Then people can throw whatever they want on it if they have the frames to spare.

Instant follow. Incredible look!

woah this is awesome

Amazing results! Would be great to see them in high quality on YouTube, if possible.

I definitely show a bit more on youtube.

a million high poly instances is a wild budget for a hand built engine. is it gpu driven culling with meshlets all the way out, or do the far trees swap to impostors? the near ones holding full detail is what sells it

No impostors are being used. It's gpu driven with meshlets and small triangles are rendered as voxels (with minimal to no detail loss).

voxels for the tiny triangles is a clever answer, that's exactly where meshlets waste the most work. no impostors at all explains why the far trees don't pop. looking forward to the write up

Looks very cool :) What's the end goal? Just a learning experience for modern rendering? Hoping to turn it into a fleshed out game?

Caeden, hi! I'm working on a game, however I've been rewriting and creating renderers on and off for the past 2-3 years. Maybe one day I will focus on the other systems as well so I can actually work on the game :)

This is badass!

Amazing. KCD-esque

Amazing job

Wow this is amazing!

I would love to walk these forests - if you ever have something to share, LMK!

Looks really cool. Great work!

Wow! Gorgeous!

Very nice!

Oh this is beautiful. We ought to compare notes! What's the performance like and what hardware target?

Depends heavily on the view. In aerial views it's ~5ms gpu time. Close to foliage it can be heavier. I'm using an rtx 3080 and I never really dip below 90 fps with GI and all the bells and whistles on. A laptop with a 3070 can hold up as well.

that is fantastic! I'm still learning about realtime cheat.. er, techniques

Hi, may i ask, Is the vegetation and the forest procedurally generated? And also, do GI used RT based or maybe other methods? This is really nice work!

The forest is procedural. The vegetation is only part procedural, I'm working on a fully procedural tree simulation but I need to work on the trunk geo generation more. GI is a voxel/screenspace hybrid, no RT.

Hey Tony, please share more of your work. We all want to get to know it!

wtf? impressive!

Looks amazing

get rid of the god awful footstep audio reality does not sound like that when walking in nature

wonderful, might work well with something I am working on

Reminds me of the sceneries in KCD2, impressive work bro

This looks amazing man! Performance looks *chefs kiss*. Some of the terrain reminds me of Satisfactory, so beautiful. I'd encourage you to keep working on it, you can tell so much love and care has gone into it <3

incredible work

looks amazing. why u left godot though? i remeber that was the most impressive envrioment i saw on godot

Because of the overhead you pay for things that you don't use. I wanted to create an engine that does mainly one thing and does it incredibly well (as well as just understanding what every part does). I still love godot and would recommend it to others.

What exactly made you decide on leaving godot? By overhead you mean those things you don't use affect performance? And you can't disable those or modify the engine so they don't bother you? It's for a game or just tech? Just being really curious u don't have to answer all lol

i lowkey thought this was one of those minecraft videos for a second

I love this! Love how you hyper focused on one specific goal and made it great. Totally crushed it

working on this same problem, extremely dense and large forests. i can get a huge number of trees down, but overdraw costs on close lods is surprisingly massive. is that something you had to solve?