How Persona Combines 2D and 3D Graphics 

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bro's trying to distract us from the Jam.

Now that you point out how ray tracing shadows work, it has just now, and only now, become intuitively apparent why my Desmos radiography machine ran like a burning dumptruck. It's a raytracing integration problem, for ten thousand pixels, running on the CPU, written in JavaScript, through an interface.

That 'bug' with the hallway light rendering is likely intended, there's a good few scenes where someone comes to talk to you and you can see out into the hall while they stand in the doorway.

Your choice of P3 music for your videos has always been great, but now it fits perfectly.

Acerola: Explains why brilliant is great My Brain: EVERYDAY IS GREAT AT YOUR JUNES!!!

I love the irony of him playing the junes song while doing a promo

that albedo pronunciation is wild

I love that you noticed the 3D model on the pause screen looks like Kingdom Hearts.

Acerola, truer words have never been spoken than couldn’t “find an example from VRChat that wouldn’t get the vid demonetized”

Fun fact, the normals of the faces of each character's meshes are hand-edited to have shadows that look more "anime" after cel-shading! This is also commonly done in VR Chat and other Atlas games. It's a painful but rewarding process. Also, I'm not sure if that discard had anything to do with the inverse hull because that outline effect is simply drawing an unlit black version of the model with its faces inverted. Since faces are single sided, no clever discarding or other shader tricks needed! Great video as always :)

Of COURSE you would do a P3 video given all the P3 music you've used in your previous videos! Super excited to watch this one :D

Words not spoken here, but you can tell Acerola was very excited for that game, literally all the background music on this channel is P3 music. It's deserved, game is awesome, I'm having a blast too!

i thought i would see something on the jam but was gifted with the menu tutorial of the century

Honestly, the fact that they created such a robust NPR lighting system in UNREAL is super impressive as Unreal previously did not make it easy to do so

The sponsor + Junes song = brilliant

I recommend looking at Arcsys games, they're also kings at stylized 3D graphics, particularly 3D that really looks like hand drawn 2D graphics. They have an old GDC talk about their Guilty Gear Xrd game revealing a lot of interesting techniques as well. It focuses mostly on 3D modeling techniques rather than shaders though, but it's still full of insight for anyone interested in non-PBR rendering.

Thanks for this video, Atlus really knows how to make slick UI and it's great to see how they approached these challenges

This video is awesome! I love the visual real examples and it's insane how concise your breakdowns of each effect are given all the complex stuff going on.

love these closer looks at the rendering process of different games!

Your videos are so sooo informative. And so fun to watch at the same time, how is it possible?? Using the freezed frame as a single texture for the UI instead of re-rendering all of the gameplay geometry feels so obvious, but my mind was blown... I can't wait to tell my team so we can implement this in our game and save some sweet battery life. Thanks Acerola (and Atlus!)

Great video. I was always curious about how persona 5 did all their incredible UI and now I understand a lot more on how its made

I love this. Can you talk about "NEO: the worlds end with you" next time? They have unique NPR style, especially for the skill fvx. Im really intrigued by it and nobody really ever discuss about it

I've been waiting for this!

The jam is in literally an hour what is this man doing?

I didn't know you posted a new vid until you were posting about how it had less engagement than usual, so naturally I had to rush to it and comment something to try and push it in the algorithm

Yes stylised Unreal Engine games do exists! I made a prototype of The Spirited Away train scene with ray traced hatching at Vimeo as an example

I am making my own 3D game engine and thus a renderer these days, and so your videos are fantastic to get an overview of things and concepts. Thank you very much! Also it took me a lot of time to wrap my head around how PBR works and you just explained it simply in a few minutes, amazing :D

ohhh my! I was waiting for this video so much!!

Bec im old/new to 3d modeling but was trying to make sense of modding a game this was such an info overload vid and extremely helpful

Incredible video. Seeing how many graphics basic concepts get applied in AAA graphics is quite beautiful. Sometimes I get overwhelmed by the startling complexity of the finished render without realizing that I know how all the components of it work and should understand what they do. But the interactions between that are so unexpected that it seems like something else. It sort of like the composition of music. Thank you for making such incredible videos and I holding my breath for the next one.

This was really well explained and *also* funny. Didnt see the time go by :)

Wow didn't noticed such details in game. Thanks for explanation!

I don't know if I am getting better at understanding interactive graphics and shaders, more crazy or it's Acelora improving with videos making it even easier to digest and understand 🤣

Not even halfway but what a video. First I’m seeing from this channel and this is so well broken down to even a newbie to game design like me. Have subbed, thanks!

It's the 4th time your videos pop up on my feed, and each time I watch them integraly and religiously. Something about the editing and "storytelling" just scratches my brain juuust right. Also I love nerding about these subjetcs, you somehow bring my class subjets back, but more interestingly. I'm subscribed now :')

I’ve been waiting for this (especially because you’ve used Persona 3 BGM in most of your videos)

🎉 ANOTHER banger video, Acerola! Very informative!

Incredibly interesting. I learned a lot, thank you for this content !

We need more youtubers like you

Have you thought of translating this to japanese and send it to the artists? Im sure they'll appreciate your hard work analysing their game.

I was just listening to the yard advice show and got jumpscared by the acerola mention, anyways amazing content as always man

P3 Reload is an interesting game, I spent a lot of time just staring at the various effects that they were using trying to figure out exactly what's going on. Now this video drops in my lap and I sit a bit stunned at the timing, an excellent breakdown. One thing that still stuns me is how they handled the gloss on the hair and the rimlight The frenel is a bit sneaky in execution. It looks like they utilize some sort of masking or additional authorship is used to control where the rimlight is, because it's generally directional compared to out of the box frenel tends to be applied over all of the model. On top of that the places where the hair shines has an interesting effect. I almost want to say that it looks like there is an additional mask for the shine so that it reflects a specific area first then is additive if they are direct lighting. Just really beautiful attention to detail, the shader artists and art director really went the full mile to make the illustrations and 3D models synergize harmoniously

acerola has such a unique feeling that always when i enter i new video i go like "oh its him" just by the way you do your things, you're really cool man, hope to be as good as you

Fantastic video as always

I’VE BEEN WAITING FOR THIS!

Great breakdown. Really interesting as someone interested in NPR graphics in general.

best info i ever had, thank you ❤

at around 7 minutes you mention that it's unfortunate how Ray Tracing reflections seem to have been an afterthought for the visual design of this game but i like to look at this from a different perspective (pun intended) as the team being incredibly intentional about their use of reflections to account and circumvent SSRs usual weaknesses. While playing the game i constantly switched between RT on and off to see how they solved different problems where SSR artifacts could have been distracting and every time i got excited by how smartly they worked around those issues. For example: small things like entering the beefbowl shop at the iwatodai strip mall where the camera again will cut to a different angle that allows the door to continue reflecting the floor tiles as you open it, regardless of whether RT reflections are on or off. Or the way the mirrors are rendered with this very opaque blue filter on top and blurring whatever is reflected in it which still vaguely lets you get the impression of something being reflected in those mirror while also hiding the fact that often you're actually seeing the backside of things reflected in it when you should be seeing the front. All these details come together in ways which make their use of SSR look incredibly effortless but must have taken an immense amount of consideration throughout. It made me almost feel bad for generally playing the game with RT reflections on but also made never feel like I was missing out whenever i turned them off for my Steam Deck sessions.

Wow. I watched the entire video already in 18 seconds, and its pretty good

after you mentioned the AO pass the first thing that came to my mind is that probably that line effect on shadows is because of the ambient occlusion sampling...

I love Persona 3 reload, and seeing what Altus was able to do here makes me so excited for what they’re gonna do in the future

The bit where you go "that's ray tracing" on the shadow explanation got a good chuckle out of me.

Incredible work

Really liked the video! 💖Love Persona to bits and was it was so fascinating to see how it all works under the hood 😍 Thank you so much for the explanations!

13:18 That made me smile and chuckle more than I think it should have.

Can’t wait for jam and can’t wait to watch dis vid 🎉

i thought the menu was 2d at first but when i look close enough, i can see the jagged line which is the polygon of 3d pretty neat stuff

i understand absolutely nothing but this was incredibly fascinating to see the breakdown of how the game is rendered :0

Thank you again Mr Rola

Watching timelapse rendering is definitely a new liked object for me now

I guessed the bug! Actually I had two guesses, either the window being noisy, or the part of the ceiling that looks like it's missing.

Amazing video ! May I ask where that opening main menu rendering was from?

The monogatari styled appendix of the whole chapters was clean

aye can you breakdown the effects in Lies of P's main lobby area in hotel Krat?

Pretty cool to see you tackle some ray tracing. Can't wait until you get a RT capable GPU and finally go more in depth with it or even create your own RT implementation in your demos

I'm not a Graphics Programmer, but this was a really interesting video to see, I'm surprised to see that the menus are actual a 3D, that was impressive, but I was even more surprised to see they're using Ray Tracing to do Global Illumination, I thought Atlus would use pre baked GI, since it's very common is some Sega games.

the layered approach to the pause menu is very involved, but interesting to try out in my own stuff

Very nice disassembly

perfect video but i wish i could see how different the render pass timing would be on a GPU with ray tracing hardware!

Damn at 12:50 when Garoad kicked on I totally got into Va-11 Hall-A mode

Holy shit. What a find! Thanks YT for such recommendation. Amazing work.

Those menus are so crazy stylish

I haven't seen the hair shadow technique done before. It seems very simple and effective, do you have any other examples of this? You mentioned VR chat but I can't find anyone doing this.

This is awesome!

YEEEESSSSSS I WAS WAITING FOR THIS VIDEO

Personally I don’t like so much the idea covering at much topic in computer graphics as fast as possible, but love your channel looking forward to see more in depth technical subject keep it up

I saw your tweet that this video is underperforming and I thought it was great so here's a comment for engagement boosting :)))) pls make more in this series

Love the random Linkin Park reference at the end. I have only a very basic understanding of render pipelines so this was a really interesting, eye-opening video. Thanks for sharing!

this just sounds like magic, I did not understand a single word but still watch the entire video

It has been quite a while I've seen this kinds of videos, I'm honestly surprised I understood when bro started speaking about vectors.

I'm glad you did a video covering this. The UI from P5 has always been my favourite, ever since I laid my eyes upon it; and the new P3 UI is just as good, if not better. It's incredible how well of a job they did with it. Shoutout to the designers and programmers. It's so stylised and fluid and definitely stands out from most other games which have fairly bland UIs. It's so good that I actually think about it on like a weekly basis, and I am always enamoured at the design. It's probably my favourite part of the game. It's always fun to see a technical breakdown and notice all the small details that go into it. There's so much variety across different aspects of the game, especially how it matches the personality traits of the related characters. It's just pure art and I love it.

i am still learning but i would lie to know if there is any site with that info about shader or coding of the original persona 3 now i am really interested about it

If every Brilliant ad is like this, i'll NEVER skip ads EVER AGAIN!

That Brilliant ad was purrfect. Best way to do ads really.

Shigenori Soejima and the art team behind Persona are among my fave artists!!! Pop art, graphical and this distinct, clean look on their anime style is so good😢❤

The random images that pop-up on screen whenever you speak are not only effective at grabbing my attention, but it also helps me understand what's going on by showing a visual representation of terminology I didn't know.

After all this time listening to Persona 3 music in your videos, there's a video on the game.

thank you funny ace man, i have been looking some fucking video essay on persona's graphics, bless you

The interview with Persona 3 Reload reveal that they do use different 3D models custom made for UI. :o

Hi acerola any chance can you do a simple analysis of Valheim? Its one of the things in the internet i couldnt find. I was able to make a clone of its volumetric lights, multicolored fog, and so on. But i feel like the topic is still a mystery to many. Im surprised such an iconic look is not covered by anyone else.

So if you don't have RT hardware or have RT disabled how does the ambient light pass at 16:50 work then? Do they fallback on cubemaps or light probes or some other solution or is it just all RT all the time?

I couldn't express how much I love the artistic style of P3R, so thank you Acerola for also showing us the work that the programmers also put into making it a reality.

@Acerola can you please explain how vertical robot does their “ray tracing” in the red matter games for the quest? Is it a modified surface cache? Is it rtgi? How the ffffff

so happy i caught the graphics bug in the window, i truly am insane.

12:15 My guess is one of two things are happening here: 1. It's rendering it for scenes where a character opens the door (shich happens a fez times during the game). 2. At one point during development, they were planning on having part of the hallway visible when the character opens the door.

17:50 as a tech artist working in Unity I am deeply wounded!

you are the man for this one

That's lit buddy.

Haven't watched yet but I know it's brilliant stuff