why is everything flat in video games? 

Earth probably isn't flat. The thing is our 7 continents are only a small part of it.

@@NikitaGal31 fun but totally useless fact; in scale, the distance between the lowest and highest points on earth's surface is so small compared to the earth's size that it'd feel smooth if you were huge enough to swipe your finger across it. So you could argue that while the earth itself isn't flat, its surface almost is lol

@@Phyllion- fun fact, that has been proven wrong, our fingers are super sensitive

It would be as smooth a queue ball.

That would require them learning math, which is too tall of a task, especially given how math is created to control the population.

The short version is that drawing an additional triangle involves a lot of math. You have to determine if the triangle should be drawn, whether it's facing the camera, and which pixels it should cover. You have to determine in what order it should be drawn so it gets drawn in front of the stuff that's further from the camera, and after the stuff that's closer. If you're using MSAA you have to do some of these computations repeatedly. You have to do all of this before you even *start* doing lighting calculations, and some of it has to be re-done for each light that touches it, depending on which overall rendering pipeline you're using. In contrast, if you're already drawing a triangle, texturing it is pretty easy. You have three known points in a texture, three known points on a triangle, and you can just do some simple math to go grab the proper texel from the texture based on where you are on the surface of the triangle (mip levels / anisotropic filtering complicate this a little, but the point stands -- texturing is super cheap). So loading an extra texture map for the normals doesn't actually cost much. And then, when you light the mesh, instead of just using the geometry normal, you grab the texel from the normal map, apply it as an offset, and do exactly the same lighting calculation you were gonna do anyway. You still had to do the lighting calculations per pixel anyway, so adding a texture read and applying the offset costs very little. Another way of thinking about it is that geometry is a much richer (and more costly) representation than normal maps are. Geometry has depth and form. It can occlude, it can be behind, or in front of things, it changes how it looks when your perspective changes, even in the absence of lighting. Its surface directional detail is only one element of a much larger whole. Normal maps are literally just "hey, pretend this bit is facing a different direction than it actually is when you light it." It works well for encoding subtle details on surfaces, but it's a fundamentally simpler representation. That's why it's cheaper.

Realized there's a bit of jargon here: Texel = pixel in a texture (as opposed to onscreen) MSAA = "A type of anti-aliasing where you re-do some of the math of drawing triangles repeatedly to avoid harsh jaggies around the edges" Mip level / anisotropic filtering = You know how old PS1/PS2 games look super fizzy when looking at the horizon? That's because when a polygon is tilted away from the camera by still visible, it's easy to get into a situation where there's more than one texel per screen pixel, because they're jammed together by foreshortening. When you draw it, you get some arbitrary pixel from the set of potential options, and if the camera moves even a tiny bit, you get a different one, which causes an ugly, noisy, unstable appearance. In real life, you just see a weighted average of all the options -- no fizz. So mipmapping / anisotropic filtering is a way to store sort of "pre-blurred" versions of the textures alongside the originals, so when you get into that situation you can grab from the blurry version that already averages that information, which solves this problem.

@@AndreInfanteInc VERY informative. Thanks for sharing.

@@AndreInfanteInc thank you so much, this was all very clear and tremendously helpful

@@AndreInfanteInc I knew a few things you said but not all of it so very fascinating ! Thanks for sharing this knowledge ;D

The amount of normal mapping used in games.

nintendo is always a generation behind with graphic sucks that they force you to buy this shit plastic shit to play there good games

@@idontknowwhatnameshouldipu1864 🤓

@@idontknowwhatnameshouldipu1864 🤓

Someone should tell The Pokemon Company about normal mapping.

As a random gamer that has math background... I've basically completely forgotten that normal means non-unnatural when looking at the thumbnail

As someone starting 3d modeling and vfx I also found it funny

as a person who just mods games and does 3D as something like a hobby . yeh it was indeed funny tho I often am too lazy to add normal maps to the models used in my mods. sometimes I don't even have any normal maps and I gotta make my own which uhh pain so yeh lmao

As somone who is alive i find this funny

💯💯💯

It's normal to think that way.

Yet it still only runs at 30 fps on the PS4.

Botw and half life alyx are insane for this

@@user-qw6ht7jw2b Ps4 only runs games at 30 fps

Yeah I really started to notice with the Liyue roof tiles

@@user-qw6ht7jw2b True, mindblowing that higher mid range phones run this game at 60 fps

I guess he's talking about tesselation. As far as I know, this technique still uses the normal maps to fake details when you're away from the 3D object. But as soon as you get closer to it, the engine will use the normal map (or another depth/height map) to brake your object into smaller polygons and translate the height of these polygons according to the texture. Basically, you're using a texture to "create details on the fly" only when needed. This cannot be confused with LODs. LODs do something similar, adding detail to the object, but in every direction and not specifically for height and depth. Also, your object need to have enough geometry for tesselation to work, so I guess it's common to combine both techniques.

@@luizfernandonoschang8298 the thing i was thinking of was parallax occlusion mapping. sisnce it looked more like that with what he showed. especially rooms inside a building. those details can be faked without tessellation

hey i discovered it in dark souls also!! i noticed it when i was in the lava area, after the discharge guy gets rid of the lava, the walls looked so crazy so i got close to them and realised how undetailed the model was and was amazed

Bro, telegram rlly seems to be popular among youtubers doing secret giveaways they never talked about in their channels

@@doodoo2065 ?

@@SimoneBellomonte i was replying to a bot impersonating this RU-vidr

OMG, thats so true. This skill is priceless for RU-vid blogger.

​@@Dany12156 Almost unprecedented 😂

What possible reason does unreal have to do that?

@@kendarr The compression type for normal maps in UE repacks R+G into RG+BA, so you get 2x the bit depth so higher precision normals. I forget the exact bit depth now, but it'll be 16 per channel instead of 8 for example, so you get might higher than 0-255 values, which creates a better overall normal but is still compressed nicely.

Since normals are normally normalized, you can calculate the missing channel if you know the other 2, so only 2 need to be stored which saves space. On the other hand, if you store all 3 channels, you can have a vector with variable length which determines light attenuation (or amplification), allowing you to do more fancy things with your normal map.

@@unrealization3332 I guess that's the reason we artists are not programers lol, thanks

@@user-qw6ht7jw2b Kinda makes sense, thanks, it's just wierd to think about it

I am not an expert on this, but if I am correct... I believe the rooms in spider man are done with parallax scrolling, which in the most basic sense is taking multiple images and making them move independently of one another, creating a 3d effect. That's just what it looks like to me, however I could be completely wrong, I believe the main menu for Halo Reach actually did this.

@@gucenuckle you are right on the money mate

@@gucenuckle oh thats really interesting!

it's a perspective-changing cube map projection (basically a fancy scrolling texture). valve games use those for reflections.

it's kinda sad they toned that down a lot in future updates. mondstadt is FULL of them, but they're few and far between in inazuma and pretty much gone in sumeru.

@@GraveUypo They'll probably use it more in Fontaine.

My main concern with games using nanite is bloating file sizes. There is something to be said about Nintendo sticking with the aging switch hardware, it keeps file sizes small and fast to download and force’s developers to actually optimize their games. That said, nanite is a impressive feat of technology for groundbreaking games

You are describing parallax occlusion mapping. Displacement mapping involves actually moving the geometry with the use of a displacement or height map.

Colors are just numbers between 0 and 255. The shaders care about the numbers, not the colors. We only use those colors to visualize the numbers because our brains can interpret the 3d effect that way (and it looks pretty fancy, ngl).

Normal mapping is a big part of what made Halo 1 on the OG xbox look SO much better than other games at the time.

Cos flat is normal, amd that when they're not flat, they'll use a normal map 🤣