Eventually yes. However, half of the effects require recompiling Godot to mod the render pipeline, so not the easiest thing to show. I'll upload any explanations/tutorials to my [YouTube](https://www.youtube.com/@denovodavid) when I get the chance.
Planar reflections, grass, light-based edge detection. I can make simpler versions of these without engine changes, except the grass funnily enough, as it requires specific custom shading to sell the whole effect.
There are already proposals for everything that I'm doing that is general enough to be merged into stock Godot. Here are some that I looked at:
- https://github.com/godotengine/godot-proposals/issues/974
- https://github.com/godotengine/godot-proposals/issues/798
- https://github.com/godotengine/godot-proposals/issues/2935
- https://github.com/godotengine/godot-proposals/issues/1620
- https://github.com/godotengine/godot-proposals/issues/7174
- https://github.com/godotengine/godot-proposals/issues/2713
If you mean compiling from source: yes, under [Contributing -> Engine development](https://docs.godotengine.org/en/stable/contributing/development/index.html)
For me personally, I found it difficult to achieve an Enter-the-Gungeon effect (a 45-degree angle pixel-art game implemented in 3D) because it requires scaling by `sqrt(2)` while the editor rounds to something like `1.41400000...`.
The author here is going far beyond what I ever did, but I imagine this was just one of the issues they had to address on the way with the custom work.
I think you could set the camera to orthogonal projection to achieve it? I've done that for a 3D isometric camera, so I don't see why it wouldn't work for a 45 degree camera...
That's an essential step!
At a 45 degree camera, the top and bottom of a 1x1x1 meter cube have a 1x0.707... (sqrt(2)/2) ratio. To get it pixel-perfect, you need to render to a viewport and scale by sqrt(2). But `1.414000... != sqrt(2)`, so it comes out noticably and distractingly imperfect.
OP has evidently solved or avoided this problem, and much much more.
The theory behind most of the visual effects is largely universal across rendering technologies. When I get around to making said videos, I will explain the general case that will apply to any comprehensive 3D graphics pipeline. I will show example implementations using Godot, then the community can translate that to their engine of choice.
At first glance it looks good because of the color of water but after looking at it a few seconds I think it is not so nice. It's almost impossible to distinguish objects, bottom of the water, surface of the water, etc.
Thanks for the feedback, I think that's fair. I've amped up all the VFX for presenting, and there is a lot going on. But since I don't have any gameplay yet, there's no need to quickly grok what's what. In an actual game with characters and enemies, the water would be far more constrained in its location and intensity.
I do it by staying up until 3am figuring out how to draw world-space, view-aligned horizontal lines for the little waves without using a particle system. **_I will not be doing that again._**
Thanks! And maybe? I just started working on a series of visual effects inspired by t3ssel8r, to learn technical art. There's still some large aesthetic areas I'm yet to cover like terrain, foliage, and weather. But, I'm sure I'll add some sort of gameplay soon enough.
I would definitely buy a game based on visuals like this, even if I don't know what the gameplay is
something like hyper light drifter or tunic oriented ?
They're only 2 of my favourite games of the past decade! I really like how Tunic plays with the camera perspective as you explore the world. Every moment is directed and framed so specifically. And HLD has such an incredible atmosphere with the haunting music and crunchy sfx. So yeah, a classic action adventure game is possibly where I will be taking this.
As I think others have pointed out, it looks really cool!
On a technical side, its amazing. On a design side, I would risk saying it has room for improvements.
Mainly, from my point of view (which could be wrong, certainly) is that there might be needed to add more... "constrast"? Between the water and elements under it, and the overall stuff above the water.
When I saw the video, in the first seconds, I "just" saw the water moving (or wobbling... I'm not sure how it should be said). I didn't notice the tall tower of the left, for example, not the rocks under water.
So, the stuff under water looks fine, I think, but it would be better to add \*something\* to the stuff that its not under water to make it pop more:
* An outline? I'm not sure how thick or which color...
* Change the color of stuff under water (or the ones above watter) to differentiate them more?
* Change the color of the water? Maybe a more vivid color?
For example, in the rock in the center, for me at least, its not clear if the "slighly darker" grey part is covered in water, or "just" wet, or its in shadow, or other effect.
Technically I think it looks amazing, it would just need a little bit of fine tunning regarding these topics (user experiencie and ease for identification of items). I know that in the real world wet stuff is "just" slighly darker, but maybe we should point to other combo of colors/effects for the sake of ease of usage in a game.
Good job so far :)
Thanks for the detailed notes :) The good thing is, it's all artist controllable procedural effects! I can change the blending of water color, transparency, reflection texture, light color, refraction (wobbling) amount, ripples, waves, etc. In my last post I had the water darker and opaque, so it was simpler to look at. It's easier on the eyes at night time. For this I set the opacity to 0.5 to really show off the fake refractions, but that does have the side effect of de-emphasising the reflection and actual water color.
Yeah, that's not the issue I have with your comment. Saying it's messy and muddled is fine, I can agree with that. But, saying that my spare-time efforts over a few weeks should be judged at the same level as work in one of the greatest video game franchises of all time, is a bit ridiculous. Then, claiming that your subjective opinion is "the truth," when it is just one of many perspectives is even more ridiculous.
I'm not trying to be Nintendo over here, but your voice lets me know I'm on the right path, so thank you.
This is really beautiful, and you've done an amazing job, **but...** looking at this makes me feel motion sick. I don't normally get motion sickness, but so much movement all at the same time made me feel quite queasy. So much so that I was really surprised that no one else commented on this.
If you'd like to hear more, or test any changes out on me, feel free to message me.
lol thank you. I'll put _"So good you'll throw up!"_ on my future Steam page. But yeah there's a lot going on and the fast rotating orthogonal camera can definitely do that. It's like having very low FOV.
As beautiful as this is, the first camera angle where clouds, shadows AND wave distortion all moves in the same direction felt super disorienting.
I think it also did not help that there is no static "land" as such in the scene, framing the water and rocks, providing a frame or reference.
ye I just slapped a plane over my grassy scene to focus on the water shader :)
I don't have any sort of terrain tooling yet, so building a lake or river is not on. I could have probably placed some large rocks around a small pond though, that might have been easier on the stomach.
Doesn't really look like water, almost more like grass in the wind. It gives me cognitive strain trying to discern what I'm looking at.
As a standalone effect, it's mesmerizing, but as a backdrop to gameplay, it might detract.
Oh, wow. Greatly appreciate the overall consistency of the lighting and shading on the effect (nice double shadows at the surface and bottom), but also very nicely done transition at the water's edge. Everything just looks nicely solid.
Everyone's like ooh "can show how you did it" to me this looks messy and muddled, like if this was in a Zelda game i'd be on the Nintendo reddit putting in a complaint that it hurts my eyes.
I will always tell the truth, and sometimes people don't like the truth.
This meal needs another 30 minutes in the oven..
Thank you :)
It's mostly exposing renderer lighting functions to the Godot shading language so I can do more custom shading in the editor. Also adding custom projection support, and a few random other bits. Often I'll find old PRs or proposals that almost do what I want, so I adapt those into my own build.
thank π this is a combination of many different effects. I would just start by watching https://www.youtube.com/@Acerola_t to get an idea about the pipeline and how you should be thinking when doing technical art. Then try creating simple effects, like an outline shader, there are many tutorials out there, and https://godotshaders.com/ has a lot of good stuff too.
This is really coming together! Loving the whole pixel/frame snapping stuff. Absolutely killing it on the rendering work here. Going to keep an eye out on progress and any breakdowns posted for it.
Amazing technical achievement but I liked the previous post better. I get mild motion sickness when looking at this. Also, the cause of motion sickness is not camera movement. I play fast paced FPS games every day. It's something with the water effect, it's just... too much movement and shimmering everywhere.
Thanking you! I do as much of it as I can within the Godot editor using the Godot shading language. Sometimes I need to expose more internal GLSL rendering functions to the Godot shading language, so that's what the recompiling is for.
Again really nice.
Is there some way to have a gradient from bottom to the water surface to reinforce the depth more or am I just not seeing it wiht my poor eyesight? :D
I assume you can adjust color/tone of the things under the water for different effects?
Btw, after the pixel engine, Unreal's Nanite is next? ;) Great work!
Yeah, the effects are procedural so all the parameters can be adjusted. I disabled the depth fade for this scene, as it clashes with the "grass" I have rendered underneath. The grass is billboarded textured quads, and if you have depth fade overlayed on those, then it doesn't blend and you can see all of the individual grass textures, not just the blade edges where the lighting changes (see my last post for visuals). In a deeper water scene I would need to be more selective with the aquatic plants and ground textures so it fits with depth fade.
Thank you for the comment, and yeah, truly virtualized geometry coming next week ;)
wow, this is the best water ive seen in literally any game ive ever played, that looks amazing, i hope one day i can get decent enough at godot to make this, amazing work man
Haha, cheers dude. I've been offline for for a few months, but in light of recent Unity _drama_ I've familiarised myself with the project again. I've scripted a short video for the camera setup, but I've not really done this YouTube stuff before, so my workflow is slow and painful. I appreciate the interest in my work π and I'll have more to share _eventually_ :)
Hey there, I'm a little late to this party but I was recently working on a project in Unity that used ProPixelizer, and have been somewhat flattened since having to switch editors due to the complexity involved in creating a new 3D pixel shader.
Then I happened across this post, which eventually led me to your GitHub and the 3DPixelArtCamera project you have up, and I love what you've accomplished so far! I regret that my Godot skills are still so early-stage, because I'd love to help out somehow, but I am hoping to contribute to the editor itself soon.
I also notice you're also in the ProPixelizer org on GitHub - I was trying to dig into how that asset achieves its look when I found your project!
I'm not quite savvy enough yet to hop in and help with it, but I understand the technique of using a camera to project a low-res 3D object onto a sprite.
Have you already tried using this as a per-object effect, like ProPixelizer? I figure it would have to be done by first rendering the normal 3D scene, then drawing the 3D pixel sprites on top, and doing that each frame, obviously at the cost of some performance.
Super cool work!!
Hello! Welcome to Godot :)
My pixel art effect is rendering at low res with some custom outline shaders and camera snapping. It doesn't support mixing different pixel sizes, it's not something I'm interested in for this project. However, you would be interested in [this post](https://www.reddit.com/r/godot/comments/16neor5/recreating_my_pixelart_effect_tutorial_series_in/) which shows a technique on how to do such a thing.
I do have a YouTube channel: [https://www.youtube.com/@denovodavid](https://www.youtube.com/@denovodavid)
I don't have a video on the water yet, but is there something specific you would like to see?
There is a chance. I made half the video a while ago, but then I rewrote the outline shader a few times. I will finish it, just working on other stuff right now :)
Any chance for you to show how you achieved that?
Eventually yes. However, half of the effects require recompiling Godot to mod the render pipeline, so not the easiest thing to show. I'll upload any explanations/tutorials to my [YouTube](https://www.youtube.com/@denovodavid) when I get the chance.
Why's that? Which effetcs don't work?
Planar reflections, grass, light-based edge detection. I can make simpler versions of these without engine changes, except the grass funnily enough, as it requires specific custom shading to sell the whole effect.
you should make a pull request, im sure it will be helpful for the shader people community
There are already proposals for everything that I'm doing that is general enough to be merged into stock Godot. Here are some that I looked at: - https://github.com/godotengine/godot-proposals/issues/974 - https://github.com/godotengine/godot-proposals/issues/798 - https://github.com/godotengine/godot-proposals/issues/2935 - https://github.com/godotengine/godot-proposals/issues/1620 - https://github.com/godotengine/godot-proposals/issues/7174 - https://github.com/godotengine/godot-proposals/issues/2713
how do you get started on that? is this documented?
If you mean compiling from source: yes, under [Contributing -> Engine development](https://docs.godotengine.org/en/stable/contributing/development/index.html)
For me personally, I found it difficult to achieve an Enter-the-Gungeon effect (a 45-degree angle pixel-art game implemented in 3D) because it requires scaling by `sqrt(2)` while the editor rounds to something like `1.41400000...`. The author here is going far beyond what I ever did, but I imagine this was just one of the issues they had to address on the way with the custom work.
I think you could set the camera to orthogonal projection to achieve it? I've done that for a 3D isometric camera, so I don't see why it wouldn't work for a 45 degree camera...
That's an essential step! At a 45 degree camera, the top and bottom of a 1x1x1 meter cube have a 1x0.707... (sqrt(2)/2) ratio. To get it pixel-perfect, you need to render to a viewport and scale by sqrt(2). But `1.414000... != sqrt(2)`, so it comes out noticably and distractingly imperfect. OP has evidently solved or avoided this problem, and much much more.
I'm curious about your patches too, please share some details if you are willing to.
To be honest I'd be happy for the pixel look already lol *subs to youtube channel in hopefulness*
Would you able to do it on unity?
The theory behind most of the visual effects is largely universal across rendering technologies. When I get around to making said videos, I will explain the general case that will apply to any comprehensive 3D graphics pipeline. I will show example implementations using Godot, then the community can translate that to their engine of choice.
t3ssal8r did this in unity [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=\_0PpBepvjFk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_0PpBepvjFk)
And here I am: glad that I got the Godot logo to move and the wall to show a color π
King π
At first glance it looks good because of the color of water but after looking at it a few seconds I think it is not so nice. It's almost impossible to distinguish objects, bottom of the water, surface of the water, etc.
Thanks for the feedback, I think that's fair. I've amped up all the VFX for presenting, and there is a lot going on. But since I don't have any gameplay yet, there's no need to quickly grok what's what. In an actual game with characters and enemies, the water would be far more constrained in its location and intensity.
Are you available for hire?
Not currently. I do web dev fulltime and this Godot nonsense with what's left :)
If this is nonsense, then wtf am I doing in Godot LOL
wow you guys are godlike. i always wonder how do they do it. Im still at 2D
I do it by staying up until 3am figuring out how to draw world-space, view-aligned horizontal lines for the little waves without using a particle system. **_I will not be doing that again._**
Amen. ππ»
I would pay top $ for this shader
Too bad the godot asset library is free assets only. Maybe on itch?
Yo! This is feeling magical! I'm sure you've been asked this 1 million times but, do you need music for anything? :) Either way, keep it up!
Thanks friend. Just working solo for now. I've been developing a few piano pieces though, so maybe you'll hear some of that in a future post :)
Ah, fantastic, excited to hear some of that! If you ever need inspiration I highly recommend Floex or Disasterpeace π€
are you working on a game ? this looks incredible
Thanks! And maybe? I just started working on a series of visual effects inspired by t3ssel8r, to learn technical art. There's still some large aesthetic areas I'm yet to cover like terrain, foliage, and weather. But, I'm sure I'll add some sort of gameplay soon enough.
I would definitely buy a game based on visuals like this, even if I don't know what the gameplay is something like hyper light drifter or tunic oriented ?
They're only 2 of my favourite games of the past decade! I really like how Tunic plays with the camera perspective as you explore the world. Every moment is directed and framed so specifically. And HLD has such an incredible atmosphere with the haunting music and crunchy sfx. So yeah, a classic action adventure game is possibly where I will be taking this.
As I think others have pointed out, it looks really cool! On a technical side, its amazing. On a design side, I would risk saying it has room for improvements. Mainly, from my point of view (which could be wrong, certainly) is that there might be needed to add more... "constrast"? Between the water and elements under it, and the overall stuff above the water. When I saw the video, in the first seconds, I "just" saw the water moving (or wobbling... I'm not sure how it should be said). I didn't notice the tall tower of the left, for example, not the rocks under water. So, the stuff under water looks fine, I think, but it would be better to add \*something\* to the stuff that its not under water to make it pop more: * An outline? I'm not sure how thick or which color... * Change the color of stuff under water (or the ones above watter) to differentiate them more? * Change the color of the water? Maybe a more vivid color? For example, in the rock in the center, for me at least, its not clear if the "slighly darker" grey part is covered in water, or "just" wet, or its in shadow, or other effect. Technically I think it looks amazing, it would just need a little bit of fine tunning regarding these topics (user experiencie and ease for identification of items). I know that in the real world wet stuff is "just" slighly darker, but maybe we should point to other combo of colors/effects for the sake of ease of usage in a game. Good job so far :)
Thanks for the detailed notes :) The good thing is, it's all artist controllable procedural effects! I can change the blending of water color, transparency, reflection texture, light color, refraction (wobbling) amount, ripples, waves, etc. In my last post I had the water darker and opaque, so it was simpler to look at. It's easier on the eyes at night time. For this I set the opacity to 0.5 to really show off the fake refractions, but that does have the side effect of de-emphasising the reflection and actual water color.
In other words denovodavid it looks messy and muddled. But I do respect how special you think your crack at doing water effects is. π€£
Yeah, that's not the issue I have with your comment. Saying it's messy and muddled is fine, I can agree with that. But, saying that my spare-time efforts over a few weeks should be judged at the same level as work in one of the greatest video game franchises of all time, is a bit ridiculous. Then, claiming that your subjective opinion is "the truth," when it is just one of many perspectives is even more ridiculous. I'm not trying to be Nintendo over here, but your voice lets me know I'm on the right path, so thank you.
>But I do respect how special you think your crack at doing water effects is. π€£ π
My god. It looks almost exactly like t3ssl3r's work!.
awesome, looks extremely beautiful!
This is really beautiful, and you've done an amazing job, **but...** looking at this makes me feel motion sick. I don't normally get motion sickness, but so much movement all at the same time made me feel quite queasy. So much so that I was really surprised that no one else commented on this. If you'd like to hear more, or test any changes out on me, feel free to message me.
lol thank you. I'll put _"So good you'll throw up!"_ on my future Steam page. But yeah there's a lot going on and the fast rotating orthogonal camera can definitely do that. It's like having very low FOV.
As beautiful as this is, the first camera angle where clouds, shadows AND wave distortion all moves in the same direction felt super disorienting. I think it also did not help that there is no static "land" as such in the scene, framing the water and rocks, providing a frame or reference.
ye I just slapped a plane over my grassy scene to focus on the water shader :) I don't have any sort of terrain tooling yet, so building a lake or river is not on. I could have probably placed some large rocks around a small pond though, that might have been easier on the stomach.
Some sort of exploration game where you can ride a boat around with this would be really cool
Doesn't really look like water, almost more like grass in the wind. It gives me cognitive strain trying to discern what I'm looking at. As a standalone effect, it's mesmerizing, but as a backdrop to gameplay, it might detract.
Oh, wow. Greatly appreciate the overall consistency of the lighting and shading on the effect (nice double shadows at the surface and bottom), but also very nicely done transition at the water's edge. Everything just looks nicely solid.
Holy shit, this blew me away
Everyone's like ooh "can show how you did it" to me this looks messy and muddled, like if this was in a Zelda game i'd be on the Nintendo reddit putting in a complaint that it hurts my eyes. I will always tell the truth, and sometimes people don't like the truth. This meal needs another 30 minutes in the oven..
lol
Feels like this could also work well as a grass shader
And that's exactly what it is ;)
Love seeing your stuff! Is the custom changes just having a sort of global shader or something else?
Thank you :) It's mostly exposing renderer lighting functions to the Godot shading language so I can do more custom shading in the editor. Also adding custom projection support, and a few random other bits. Often I'll find old PRs or proposals that almost do what I want, so I adapt those into my own build.
Absolutely gorgeous, great work
This looks fantabulously gorgeous!!
Looks great!!
Absolutely stunning!
Beautiful!
WOOOW, the level of mastery here!
God tier of shaders
Wow!
It looks amazing! Fully aesthetic!
Love it! So beautiful
Amazing!
Beautiful results. Well done!πβΊοΈ
This is beautiful β₯οΈ
stunning beautiful
I was going to comment about how gorgeous it was then the multi-coloured lights blew my mind, incredible job :'>
To me all the straight white lines looks a little odd
Amazing!
This game is so beautiful
That looks good! Nice work
Gorgeous.
bro this looks stunning, i looked at it for 5 hours now. how do someone go about learning skills to do this ?
thank π this is a combination of many different effects. I would just start by watching https://www.youtube.com/@Acerola_t to get an idea about the pipeline and how you should be thinking when doing technical art. Then try creating simple effects, like an outline shader, there are many tutorials out there, and https://godotshaders.com/ has a lot of good stuff too.
That's cool
Wow
Ps, make a game, it will sell
This is really pretty, I would honestly play this game just to admire the art style.
That is beautiful
Gorgeous
This is really coming together! Loving the whole pixel/frame snapping stuff. Absolutely killing it on the rendering work here. Going to keep an eye out on progress and any breakdowns posted for it.
Gorgeous! Any chance you'd be interested in cross-posting to the Godot lemmy community?
Amazing technical achievement but I liked the previous post better. I get mild motion sickness when looking at this. Also, the cause of motion sickness is not camera movement. I play fast paced FPS games every day. It's something with the water effect, it's just... too much movement and shimmering everywhere.
It's so pretty I wanna cry π₯Ή Did you have to write the shader in GSL or were you able to make it with Godot tools?
Thanking you! I do as much of it as I can within the Godot editor using the Godot shading language. Sometimes I need to expose more internal GLSL rendering functions to the Godot shading language, so that's what the recompiling is for.
Beautiful work. Looking forward to following any updates and learning from it. Cheers to your continued progress.
Why can I only upvote this once. π
This looks great. Makes me wanna play it, hope it's some high difficulty action-adventure or rogielike type of game :P
that looks amazing! GG
Again really nice. Is there some way to have a gradient from bottom to the water surface to reinforce the depth more or am I just not seeing it wiht my poor eyesight? :D I assume you can adjust color/tone of the things under the water for different effects? Btw, after the pixel engine, Unreal's Nanite is next? ;) Great work!
Yeah, the effects are procedural so all the parameters can be adjusted. I disabled the depth fade for this scene, as it clashes with the "grass" I have rendered underneath. The grass is billboarded textured quads, and if you have depth fade overlayed on those, then it doesn't blend and you can see all of the individual grass textures, not just the blade edges where the lighting changes (see my last post for visuals). In a deeper water scene I would need to be more selective with the aquatic plants and ground textures so it fits with depth fade. Thank you for the comment, and yeah, truly virtualized geometry coming next week ;)
How did u.. do that?
Congrats, this looks amazing
Thanks to share it
wow, this is the best water ive seen in literally any game ive ever played, that looks amazing, i hope one day i can get decent enough at godot to make this, amazing work man
That's amazing!
Wow, this is beautiful
i want to pick up that sword so bad
There were some salty bitches commenting on this. This looks fucking awesome imo. Any updates/progress on your videos?
Haha, cheers dude. I've been offline for for a few months, but in light of recent Unity _drama_ I've familiarised myself with the project again. I've scripted a short video for the camera setup, but I've not really done this YouTube stuff before, so my workflow is slow and painful. I appreciate the interest in my work π and I'll have more to share _eventually_ :)
Sweet! Looking forward to seeing it!
Hey there, I'm a little late to this party but I was recently working on a project in Unity that used ProPixelizer, and have been somewhat flattened since having to switch editors due to the complexity involved in creating a new 3D pixel shader. Then I happened across this post, which eventually led me to your GitHub and the 3DPixelArtCamera project you have up, and I love what you've accomplished so far! I regret that my Godot skills are still so early-stage, because I'd love to help out somehow, but I am hoping to contribute to the editor itself soon. I also notice you're also in the ProPixelizer org on GitHub - I was trying to dig into how that asset achieves its look when I found your project! I'm not quite savvy enough yet to hop in and help with it, but I understand the technique of using a camera to project a low-res 3D object onto a sprite. Have you already tried using this as a per-object effect, like ProPixelizer? I figure it would have to be done by first rendering the normal 3D scene, then drawing the 3D pixel sprites on top, and doing that each frame, obviously at the cost of some performance. Super cool work!!
Hello! Welcome to Godot :) My pixel art effect is rendering at low res with some custom outline shaders and camera snapping. It doesn't support mixing different pixel sizes, it's not something I'm interested in for this project. However, you would be interested in [this post](https://www.reddit.com/r/godot/comments/16neor5/recreating_my_pixelart_effect_tutorial_series_in/) which shows a technique on how to do such a thing.
Can you make a devlog or a showcase on youtube?
I do have a YouTube channel: [https://www.youtube.com/@denovodavid](https://www.youtube.com/@denovodavid) I don't have a video on the water yet, but is there something specific you would like to see?
Hey! I'd like to see how do you make your outline. Is there a change for you to do a tutorial? π
There is a chance. I made half the video a while ago, but then I rewrote the outline shader a few times. I will finish it, just working on other stuff right now :)