Parallax mapping is also how RDR2’s landscape textures look very detailed at times. All the little rocks, dirt, paths look like they’re tessellated but a closer look at them reveals it’s parallaxed
0:33 i just love how the interior changes in a split second when the protagonist crawls around the corner. Suddenly, a kitchen area turns into a dining area with a door on the left that leads you out of the building on the 30th floor.
Those must be the emergency exits. There were plans to put in a fire escape, but they ran out of money and figured just the doors would be good enough.
Yeah, the problem is the window. You cannot fake that with textures. One possibility would be to use real rooms for the corners of a building, but that is expensive.
Indeed a limitation of the technique, but I’d argue the profits (greatly) outweigh the expense. Also, this could be used to great effect in another game to be purposefully ‘trippy’.
A common problem with parallax mapping on surfaces that characters stand on is that it makes the player look like they are floating above the ground, as is seen when turning around in Genshin impact.
I'm not well versed in 3D but couldn't they have used normal maps instead of displacement maps? Normals may not be the best for low end devices but it could be visually better. But then again it's a game and not really a render piece.
@@이마크-r8e both normal maps and displacement maps are used, the difference is that a normal map tells how a surface interacts with light, while a displacement map is more about what parts of the surface the player can see (the whole "fake depth" bit from the video). To get the best kind of results you want to use both since they provide information on different aspects of a material
Really interesting. Thinking about how older games handle this, it's usually that every window has glare on it / reflects the sky. I never thought of this as overcoming the limitation of not needing to draw every single window, but it's actually a really elegant solution. It's fine from a distance. parallaxing seems to be the next step up. Easter egg should be one room you can actually interact with :D
@@twodollarking8009 I'm not sure when they were first used but I'm specifically remembering games like battlefield 2142, NFS and James bond games on gamecube.
@@twodollarking8009 they don't use this for windows (as most buildings can be entered/destroyed) but in Crysis they used Parallax Occlusion Mapping pretty heavily. They even went an extra step above and made the parallax textures self-shadow... And that game came out in 2007.
That does look really cool ! I think that the extra bit is distorted, if you look really closely, because they are pushing the technique quite far. It's like the original problem of textures with depth looking too flat, but they've buried the problem one level of illusion deeper than normal. My brain didn't even notice the distortion, first and second time around.
It amazes me how creativity has developed solutions in every restrictions 👍 You got 2D? No problem, use parallax like Super Mario You got restricted polygon in PS1? No problem, use fog to ease the render process like Silent Hill You got full city map? No problem, use cube map to make those windows looks alive
ok good, I was expecting this to be a stupid technicality of "one polygon" meaning "one type of polygon", explaining how 3d objects are (usually) made up of all triangles
1:50 Personally my favorite part of the video. Right here is genuinely some of the best insight on game development I've seen, you break things down so well.
Don't get confused by Parallax and Tessellation *1.* Parallax is a 2D Fake 3D to fool your eyes, it's the old tech used first in FEAR Game back in 2005 on PC, and it was supported by DirectX 8 & 9, DirectX 9 has higher depth and improvement over DirectX 8 *2.* Tessellation is a Fake 3D Cover of the lower polygons, which makes it completely High polygons, that you can't see a single square or visible polygon, it was used first in DirectX 11 Games Like S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Call of Pripyat on Characters model
Yeah I always loved those deep POM bullet impacts in FEAR. Perfect Dark Zero on the X360 had some really nice POM brick textures too. Crysis 2 with its DX11 update also had some great textures with it. Really cool tool/trick in games.
Serious Sam: The First Encounter used tesselation in 2001, specifically the ATI-developed TruForm technology. Sadly it didn't catch on. You got me interested which the earliest parallax title was, if it was available as early as DX8.
@@WTFBOOMDOOM I played the Serious Sam: The First Encounter it doesn't have tesselation, also i sreach on RU-vid i didn't find one, will you show me proof a video or gameplay photo please
@@FantasyNero Search for Serious Sam TruForm here on RU-vid, there are some videos. The game came out in early 2001, the technology appeared in August; it was introduced to Serious Sam in patch 1.06 from December '01. According to Wikipedia it only supported new Radeon cards (makes sense because video cards aged very fast back then). It was later introduced to the Terascale architecture in 2007.
It's amazing to think about how these little rooms, in what is considered a graphically amazing game today, will , in the next ten years, be considered old-school. Like , my kid in the not far off year of 2030 playing the game "Wow, the rooms weren't even 3D, they were just flat textures. I can't believe people thought these were good graphics."
i think itll be more along the lines of how we look at optimizations in older games today, especially the old pokemon games. its less of "wow they really couldnt even afford to use a bit more data on the textures?" and more along the lines of "look what they were able to do with the technology of the time"
dont realy except that big change in 2030, we are pretty much in stagnation, as limits are mostly budget, skill and time, not technology technology for sure is going to mostly give us real time reflections, right now most reflections in games are either screen space reflections and cubemap reflections, those tricks are quite cheap and effective but require some work from the developers, meanwhile raytracing will put most of the workload on user hardware instead isnt it ironic that more realistic reflections in games will require less work from developers?
@@arekkrol9758 2 Minute Papers just did a thing on Nvidia making headway on realtime 3d raytrace rendering. Cutting down rendering times to a fraction of what they were will make future game and tv show effects look absolutely beautiful.
Hey, I'm a 90's kid, I like my 3D models simple and blocky. Seriously though, I bear witness to my own complete disinterest in realistic graphics. A good art style though, that'll grab my attention. Also, I like videogames being videogamey. The music, the graphics. It just looks and sounds real now. Old school and indie games it is for me then.
Devs could've just made the windows reflective so we won't see the interior that's why I appreciate them doing this to make the world a bit more immersive
I was hoping you would have said "crysis" and not genshin impact as an example... "crysis" was one of the first games to use parrallax occlusion mapping and it was so advanced that it blew everyones mind how mud tracks and rocks are 3D and realistic.
@@Rossilaz58 yeah i mean it is cool with the art style and modern take on the cell shading but i mean come on it doesn't use any new cutting edge tech. All of that existed way before genshin and the games which used it the most intensively and perfectly should be showcased... or mentioned. I'd like to hear about other games not just genshin how it does something xD
@@sermerlin1 yeahhh the genshin shilling is a little worrying, at least from someone who’s never played it (I mean, it looks like an overly produced predatory mobile game from the outside looking it, but I’ve been wrong before 🤷♂️) but if you ignore that these videos are actually really informative so I watch em lol
@@maninblack3410 In the past he's described Genshin Impact as the prettiest game he has ever played. I'm inclined to agree. It's a truly breathtaking game Damn shame that nobody else in the AAA scene seems to be interested in making a proper standalone game with the same anime-inspired art style
"not genshin".. Mentioning genshin and using it as an exemple in this video is valid and poses no problem. This channel isn't about game dev history, and showing who did it the first or the best isn't the goal here either. Genshin is relevant here because it is popular now, more than crysis is today, and the creator seems to enjoy it too. Sure, that 15 year old game that isnt a pionner in that particular tech might have used it very well too, but you're just using it as an excuse, trying to invalidate genshin because you don't like that game you never played
Parallax mapping is a trip! I remember being amazed at the technique being used in Oblivion, and Parallax Occlusion mapping in Crysis, back in 2008. Never could I imagine it being used to simulate interior rooms in entire skyscrapers.
I remember the first time seeing parallax mapping in the original F.E.A.R and I was blown away, me and my friends couldn't figure out how they were making their bullet hole effects look so realistic as they were parallax mapped to give depth, we assumed it was actually taking chunks out of the walls. Really fucking cool technology.
Parallax mapping is also a continuation of the old good "voxel" terrain renderers like seen in Commanche and Outcast. In those it was common to raysurf or share ray distance between pixels so the ray casting/tracing doesn't have to visit same heightmap texels multiple times.
3:18 LMAO, this is my first time watching any of your videos and I legit thought it was over. Started comment scrolling, realized this video was JUST dropped, then got scared shitless by you talking again. Great humor, great information, awesome video, keep it up
I hate these videos so much. You guys just end up filling my friends head’s with dumbass ideas they don’t understand and then they keep asking me to make a game under the guise of “just use a polygon for each room” or “just use lumen”
They need to add a rule in to deal with rooms on the edges of buildings to allow it to look more natural. For example, get rid of doors that would lead to someone walking out of the 7th floor and onto the mains street.
It can be done but sorting is a massive pain in the bum and needs cpu. Im sure spiderman 2 will do it on 1 they were super held back with regards to cpu power
Yep I did notice that all the rooms lead into one another in spiderman & i did notice they were planes if anything it could of done with more blinds & closed curtains.
This is really well made and interesting, I love learning how things work that i’d never even considered while playing! also that voice crack made me double take lmao
I wonder if you could combine that texture parallax from the bricks with the room parallax, so that the fake room appears to have more depth, such as making the furniture warp a bit as you pan past it.
No need. We have a new technique that created a sliced parallax map which gives 100% authenticity on the inside of the room to look like geometry. You literally have to look mega close to figure out if its using it.
About the Genshin part, I've always been confused because I see the floor and I'm like: "Hey, this has height and all, it's really well made!", but then I lower the camera and it's all plain and I'm like "Huh? It's a 2D texture?". Lastly I check it from diferent angles and see again the height and get confused lmao
03:11 Tip: you can make basically any normal map or height map you want to extremely easily by importing your texture into the software called "meshify"
In practice parallax mapping is taken a step further and POM(occlusion) is used which is essentially the same technique but with more samples and a LERP
Now correct me if I’m wrong, but don’t games generally use triangles for “polygons” making these windows 2 polys? Perhaps there are different 3D rendering engines, for games or other software, just curious on that
The first time I noticed this technique was when I first went through Fallout 3. I noticed that the bullet holes were more like craters with actual depth, and that blew my mind like nothing else.
well.. to be very precise, polygon just means many-gon/n-gon. So a polygon can be anything from a triangle, quad, pentagon, and so on. I think what you're referring to is that a quad is made of 2 triangle aka tris, and that's indeed true 😄
thats definitely a parallaxed texture bud. You can tell by looking at how the texture shifts under the character's feet at the camera rotates. a normal map is more static
Or does anybody know where I can buy 3-D parallax textures for blender cities or or a tutorial that would teach me how to rip the ones out that really huge Matrix city unreal engine released
Do you have a tutorial or can you show one where you can do large amounts of buildings quickly as I gotta have a good workflow but that video of spider man on the building up close like that is so awesome
First experienced this when playing Forza Horizon 5 when it first launched. I went I to drone mode and noticed that a nearby house had an interior. However u can easily tell that the interior is not fully modeled as playground didn’t put a lot of time into them
I had looked into how Parallax Mapping worked for the windows back when Spider-Man first came out, but it was hard to understand exactly how it made an ENTIRE room. Your breakdown was very simple and clear, and the Unreal Engine demos around 4:06 really sealed the deal. I love the long environment breakdowns but these shorter videos on specific elements are really great to watch.
New thought. Could someone make a character using parallax mapping from 5 sides of a box simulating each direction of the character? Even better would be to do it from multiple poses to simulate movement.
You should start uploading in 4k. Considering your channel is about video game graphics and art, I think your channel could greatly benefit from this. Love the videos, by the way!
My "explain like I'm 5" for parallax mapping is that it's like that cool street art you might have seen online or in person, where someone draws an image on the floor which, when viewed from a specific angle, looks like a 3D image but from the wrong angle just looks like a smear. The GPU is doing the same thing, but it's just redrawing that street art every frame based on the angle the camera is at.
@@GraveUypo GPU renders in tris, so technically 2 polygons are being rendered. You are right though, I'm just being a dick about how clickbaity the title is.
Me: I'd like a job as a coder Employer: what's your experience? Me: I know about parallax maps Employer: .....anything else? Me: I know what if and statements are Employer: Janitor's office is right over there, welcome aboard
If that's what it takes for devs to build up their energy towards more dynamic and more creative and less bugged games I'm totally okay with it because it works.
It continues to impress me the kinds of tricks developers have created to optimize games so well while also making the worlds feel alive. I remember being blown away when I first saw this being used in A Hat in Time (a number of windows in Mafia Island use this technique, or at least something very similar). It does such a convincing job of creating a more authentic environment.
You should never work in game dev then. All illusion will be broken. I've not played a game in 12 years that I haven't stared at and spent my time looking at how they made it. The best thing about game dev though is there is always something new around the corner. So every now and again we get excited by the tech that you see 2-3 years later but by that time we are bored of it :D
You could've mentioned that height mapping is commonly used together with a normal map to simulate the lighting in a way that looks more convincing but guess not
