The Strange Graphics Of LETHAL COMPANY 

The first 500 people to use my link will get a 1 month free trial of Skillshare: skl.sh/acerola01241 ! #ad With the new year this video marks the "third season" of my videos (the second season probably started with the ff14 video), so we have a new logo in the intro that I hope you all enjoy! Does the new logo mean merch soon? Nope! Anyways, I have a big announcement coming in about 10 days, so please look forward to it!

I can't believe the helmet visor is an actual 3D model and not a simple PNG applied over the entire screen.

“As usual a huge thank you to ALL my current patrons” *My eyes lock to Penile Necrosis* Umm. Thank you Mr penile necrosis for paying Acerola to flip the unity render over for us… I’m gonna go now

I would love for this to be a full series where you cover different games

Love how you find out that Lethal Company was made with Unity by dumping assets with an external tool even though the first screen you'll see when starting Lethal Company is "Made with Unity"

I like to imagine the dev just had no idea what they were doing with the shaders, made something super slow, couldn’t figure out how to optimise it, then just went screw it and lowered the resolution and called it a day

It's like the graphical equivalent to a 24-bit DAW project file exported as an 96kbps MP3 and then converting that to FLAC.

Just one guy with no shader coding experience made this. That's inspirational as fuck.

You can be sure even Lethal company dev learned stuff from this vid

Man, putting the cat video on the screen during the ad read is such a 200 IQ move. I'm surprised more people don't do something like that.

babe wake up

seeing all the stuff computers do in a single frame makes me realize how powerful computers really are and it's not like this is intensive either

I understand why they didnt use occlusion culling in the dungeons. Unity requires you to bake the occlusion data with static objects already in the scene, but since the rooms are procedurally placed there is nothing to bake. There ARE third-party dynamic occlusion systems available that can do this at runtime though.

Loved the video! Although, I think chromatic abberation is also used in the game several times, such as when you're being chased, or when you look at other player's dead body.

As someone who's just now learning how to optimize the performance of a game, this was deeply insightful. That's also a ridiculous amount of drawcalls... Those drawcalls were definitely multiplied by the shaders and post processing he is using. For anyone wondering, shadows and lighting are horrendously expensive for games.

One things I really love about the game's visuals is the fact that not only are they realistic at first, they're stylized in a way that the game footage genuinely does look like some sort of LiveLeak, low-quality footage (though I'm not one to watch THOSE videos so maybe I'm wrong) Which helps tons for the workplace gone wrong mood the game has.

I've never really been into game development, but I really want to make a game in the art style of Lethal Company , It Steals, and jdh's game

The off kilter origional resolution to native resolution ratio actually kinda works. (Which really surprises me). I think its because it matches shitty work cameras and the low effort rendering and ui design you often find on professional software. Like you are operating some shit software for a minimum wage job.

I love watching videos about graphics programming without actually doing graphics programming

By the way, the helmet is not just a mask, it is a full-fledged helmet in which a camera was inserted, this can be understood when you use mods that you can freely move the camera, if you look at the point where your character stood, you can see flying hands and a comically large helmet.

4:24 The huge "UNITY" logo every time you start the game didn't tip you off? In all seriousness though, good and interesting analysis

Putting a cat video during the ad break must be the smartest thing I've ever seen done on youtube.

CPU is officialy Doctor Phil in Acerola Lore.

It's kind of crazy that all of this can happen up to 144+ times a second. Like actually wild

im guessing the weird resolution stretch is intentional, presumably to add some noise to the moving image and probably also some weird blurring. Since pixel interpolations aren't perfect, it leaves the output in a weird mix of high res and low res, It's terrible for media transcoding. But for video games, could be clever use of visual artifacting.

I love how he put a cat on the side of the screen so people can watch the sponsorship without watching the sponsorship

Lethal Company is to me, a great example of what games should be doing with the crazy rendering techniques and hardware. They've clearly put a lot of effort and time into getting the game to be rendered with a very unique art style. It's pretty easily recognizable as Lethal Company from every screenshot I've seen. I'd rather see more games with cool styles and rendering tricks like this than the 587th hyper-realistic ray-traced release that 12% of steam users can run at native resolution.

I second the comment about doing this type of video for more games. The hardest thing about shaders for me, is that I can't seem to make the connection between the raw shader effect, and its usage in-game. But when someone points it out to me (like you), it makes complete sense. You provide that moment of revelation. Thank you. Please make more :)

Crazy man that in this day and age games still render full environments even if player is in doors and looking at wall. Good analysis, hope it turns into series ! 👍

The genius behind the cat video during the sponsored ad is incredible. I wish more people done that xD

Holy good LORD look at that Acerola graphic. You little tiger you!

Not gonna lie, as an artist who has dabbled with 2d and 3d computer graphics, I've been wanting really complex lighting on simple scene forever. =)

I wondered how Lethal Company made its graphics for ages and I am so happy you of all people covered it! Thank you! Definitely inspiring!

I always see people saying Lethal Company has "potato level" graphics, but from day one I knew this game was doing some nifty stuff behind the scenes before stylizing the crap out of it. The way that a jetpack's flame reflects all over the company moon when flying around, and the way the moist walls in the facility reflect the light of a scrap lamp when a crewmate is carrying it around, it's all pretty impressive, even with all the pixelation going on. The turret's laser is one of the most masterfully done lighting aspects in the game imo.

I can confirm that the resolution of the game is a major reason why it performs well. When using a mod to upscale it to 1080p, my GPU is basically on fire. Even at more reasonable resolutions, I'm still seeing temps upwards of 90 degrees on my 3070. My assumption was that it was mostly due to the post processing, but HDRP would also make a lot of sense also, having started writing my own mods and decompiling the game now (2 months later), can confirm that HDRP eats up a massive chunk of per-frame render time. Unity's built-in profiler basically only registers HDRP as causing any lag whatsoever, with other code being very minimal in impact. I wish I could see how bad the volumetric lighting is, but that appears to be bundled in with other passes, so it doesn't show up in the profiler separately. I've been working on mods specifically to optimize the game performance recently, although my focus has been more on the raw code (specifically code involved in loading that can easily take 300+ ms per frame) rather than rendering. I'd love to optimize the rendering, but I also don't think that simply reducing graphics settings is a good enough solution. It _works_, but I feel like there has to be a lot that the game does that could be faked effectively without harming performance significantly. There's still not much I can do about the general slowness of HDRP though. That part is pretty well baked into the compiled game, and modding it away wouldn't be particularly easy I don't think

Acerola is probably my favorite channel to watch lately. I love the breakdowns

I think this game is genius in that these post-processing effects basically let them use low poly graphics that look great

you are in my top 10 human beings list

Acerola ive seen you grow from the start and i love your content! You got me into graphics programming!

I've got to keep some of your videos on a playlist, they feel like a course overview, as though they'd let me skip an entire course for the gist of it and apply what I need right away. Thank you for doing what you do. In this video alone is enough information to construct my own unique graphical style, perhaps even intentionally. In seriousness, each one gets my mind racing faster than I can keep up, it's a lot of information presented very well in a short span.

@Acerola_t, I subscribed not only for your content, but for your unique practices such as the many GIFs used to explain things and my favorite: the cat during the sponsored message. This is such a good way to get people who would normally skip past a sponsored message (such as myself), to actual sit and pay attention.

there is nothing that provides me the motivation i need to finish out this software engineering degree like a new upload from acerola

awesome video, I really liked learning about the stylizing

Its mindblowing that for each frame there are 20,000 API calls and its doing this 60+ times per second with less than 10ms of delay. I feel like modern graphics computing is one of those things that would seem truly impossible if it werent for the fact that it just exists and we're all used to it now. Also, I love lethal company's graphics design philosophy. More games should experiment with sacrificing resolution so they can make use of expensive effects. Ive thought this for many years, but resolution and high fidelity is not very important unless its a competitive game. The human brain is really good at filling in details on its own so we dont actually care about things being blurry/pixelated, we tend to adjust to it within minutes. Anyone who plays older games can tell you that you forget youre playing a game from 1995 within 10 minutes and you never feel like the graphics suck unless it was just poorly done. What matters most is the "feel" of the graphics, and lethal company certainly wouldnt be the same game without the volumetric fog and depth of field.

Love how this game really fits many topica u discussed before as if u made the game before. Love this series I hope u continue doing it it's so informative.

You run the most inspiring easily digestible high quality valuable information packed channel for graphics. Thank you.

I'll just comment after I hit like. You deserve a ton of success in your edutainment career! I'll take a look at that real time rendering book. Please continue presenting the elbows on table way to learn this stuff. Kudos

Dude. You're actually genius for putting a video of your cat playing during the ad. This is the first time I didn't skip an ad. Bravo!

1. LOVE the new new title card 2. I had actually considered asking about this game in your chat the next time you streamed even though I'm not active there, but I rarely manage to catch one of your streams. Really glad to see you taking a look at Lethal!

This video made me drink water.. for some reason...

Actually, it isn't that hdrp is MEANT to be slow. It just give you to choices to make your game run slow. Rust was ported over to hdrp a few years back and it looks amazing while performing well even on older hardware like a gtx 970.

I wasn't expecting much of this video. I got right most stuff of the pipeline just by looking at it but the in-depth analysis of what really matters makes this video a must see. Nice work!

these videos are so fantastic and get me excited to learn more about graphics programming :) lethal company has such a visual charm to it, and its fascinating to see the unconventional choices that were made to give us such an interesting game, even if it is at a bit of a performance cost (which imo is more than acceptable for a game made by a single person) thanks for reporting this stuff with your knowledge and hard work, you're creating an amazing resource with this channel

imagine how slow lethal company would run at full resolution... Although gotta give the dev credit for using ray-marched volumetric effects and having them matter for gameplay.

LETS GO ITS ANOTHER ACEROLA VIDEO

i really like this idea for a video. maybe this could become a series where you explain how specific games do their art

Crazy how quickly this channel has become one of my favorites! Keep up the amazing work!

please make a behind the graphics for ori and the will of the wisps, i loved that game and would love to see a video about it!

omg an interesting video about a game I like, but also omgomgomg there's a sponsorship containing cute clips of a cat!!!!!!!! I love this channel so much

Dude, I cheered out loud when I saw you had posted a new video. Second/third/affirm the comments that say you should make this a series - only if it helps you in your journey, of course. Your videos focused on helping beginner game devs get intermediate-level skills are fantastic, and really inspiring. Thank you for all your hard work!

Wow, got randomly suggested and I must say I really like your style! Didn't even know you could just debug a frame rendering like this, good stuff

This video felt a bit more similar to your older style. I like it

The new intro logo is indeed pretty cool

Flip8ing amazing stuff on you Acerola and the dev, and here I thought it was some simple stuff

Never in my wildest dreams i would have thought rendering one single image is that complex. You always learn something new! Fantastic!

A very good a and interesting video! Nice work!

CLIMAX RETURN FOR THE RECAP FUCKED ME UP😭😭 great vid

Great video, love the breakdown! Really like rendering styles like the one from Lethal Company.

Excellent analysis. This kind of content is extremely useful for anyone working on 3D graphics for their own games

I think the reason for the unity rendering stuff upside down might be actual opengl/vulkan/whatever under the hood. When I was using OSMesa (a lib which emulates opengl) the pixels were located at (x, height-y-1). Maybe same happens in card accelerated graphics. But that's just a theory :^)

I was thinking of doing a graphics study of Lethal Company knowing it would be bad, didnt know it was this bad. Great vid

this is such an interesting video, i had no clue so much went into frames! ive certainly learned a lot today :o

Hi there Acerola, really enjoyed this format! I hope you'll cover some other games with interesting visuals such as Lethal Company, whether they're considered beautiful or not, the provided information are gold. Also, happy new year!

I think they also are using that ps1 effect on the walls in some areas? I know when you go to sell the giant wall is all weird and wobbly.

Mr. Graphics has done it again

More Behind The Graphics! I love that! Thank you for that great content.

absolutely sick video, hope you dive into more games like this (also the va11halla background music yummy)

So, some optimizations they could make is: 1. use an overlay or a cheaper blurring method for the helmet 2. Use geometry culling to hide certain areas behind walls which shouldnt be visible 3. render the game at a perfect ratio resolution for the monitor its being displayed in, such that theres no stretching 4. posterize the colors instead of the volumetric lighting to improve performance

I like the pace, good video! Thanks!

I didnt know you before but I see you have some dev knowlage like me and I really like this frame breakdown video. Hope to see more. Glads

Coming from the modding side of this game to add a note about the dungeon taking so much longer to render: The dungeon isn't static geometry, it's generated at run time so it can't use occlusion culling like the surface of the moon can. Furthermore, the dungeon also uses entirely dynamic lights as it can't spawn static or baked lights at run time.

I think part of lethal company's success is its uncanny graphics, and that it was probably intentionally made look like that.

0:47 love the monogatari style intro

One of your most interesting videos! I loved this deep dive with explanations. As a digital artist whose main tools are Blender and Photoshop it’s super insightful and interesting!

god i love your videos

😂 oh wow, I would never have guessed it uses the HDRP. I wouldn't be surprised if it's kind of a joke for the developers. Very entertaining and insightful episode 😊

What an incredible insight into the render process, stellar video!

This is fascinating. I don't know anything about computer graphics, but you explained it in a way that was easy for me to understand (and funny). Thank you!

Such a Brazilian name you have.... hmmmmmmm

Lethal company has a low style graphics and yet it still runs terriblly

This was such a cool video! Thank you for the breakdown!!

I don't usually watch videos in my recommended feed, but damn I'm so glad I did today. Great video! You got a new sub!

Man, this was precisely the game I wanted to see you cover. Danke Schoen, my friend.

Please make more of these! It was great from a entertainment standpoint but also contained a ton a valuable knowledge that my little brain can subconsciously absorb!

10:45 I knew it was doing something odd inside. My FPS would tank significantly. This explains it.

Just found my new favorite youtuber, feeling good. Fr tho amazing video, keep it up man :]

8:13 you can tell this because in game, the helmet reacts to lighting changes.

More of these please. in between your longer projects.

Awesome So nice to see this behind the curtain look at a uniquely shaded game

Thank you for sharing your genius with us and putting time to make this quality content. I always laugh at the little quips and jokes or gifs/memes