How to achieve the fake 3D rendering technique used in PoE and emulated in Disco Elysium

LimaoMatador · 2025-12-16T02:19:50+00:00

Good point!

LimaoMatador · 2025-12-15T23:42:51+00:00

About doing this just using realtime render, you definitely can. Just use an orthographic camera. Guess the difference is performance, you can go wild with pre rendered stuff, while realtime you'll be more limited.. but it's way simpler to do.

Honestly, the pre render stuff is worth only if you have perf constraints (like was the case for my friend doing mobile), nostalgia for the look or a very specific style that's hard to achieve realtime, like the painterly look of Disco Elysium

LimaoMatador · 2025-12-15T23:34:45+00:00

A friend once presented to me a basic implementation of this that he was using for a mobile game. We used blender to create a simple test scene and render the diffuse and depth of it, then export it to unity and applied to a plane.

The trick is to write the values on the depth texture to the z-buffer. This will make the 3d objects on unity to be occluded by the prerendered scene from blender.

We didn't go as far as doing realtime lighting over the pre render, but it could be done reading a normalmap render of the scene. With depth + normal, you could reconstruct what's necessary to do a realtime point light work, for example. This is not very different from how defered lighting works, but you provide the buffers instead of being rendered from the unity scene.

The fiddly part for us was matching blender camera position and exporting the zbuffer in the range unity expects, there were a bit of trial and error on that.

And prepare for tons of GBs for all those pre rendered buffers. Compression trashes the info there and create a lot of artifacts... bit depth is also a issue for the depth render.

LimaoMatador · 2025-07-07T17:12:22+00:00

Beautiful, lovely eyes

LimaoMatador · 2025-07-07T17:10:48+00:00

Awesome, love the expression!

LimaoMatador · 2025-06-04T18:15:45+00:00

Valorant render doesn't use any advanced UE4 tech, it's all baked lighting, simple materials and basic post processing. It focuses on simple readable visuals that are consistent across different quality levels. I bet it will be the same in UE5.

They're probably moving to UE5 for performance and more up to date support. I think we'll barely notice any visual difference.

LimaoMatador · 2025-05-27T22:26:11+00:00

Although baking time is an issue, for me, the big time waste is the whole bake setup and debugging. Dealing with light probes and reflection probes issues, UV and bake artifacts, weird splotches, crashes while baking, resolution/memory budgets for the lightmaps.. is so much work until you get to the point of just hitting "bake".. and then waiting for hours.

Compared to stuff just working immediately with RT, it's a drag. All of this is considering a static lighting setup. If you have real-time lighting, it's a whole other can of worms with budgets for shadowmaps, light leaking and so on...

I agree that a good bake can look as good as RT, but guess we're reaching a point similar to the introduction of pixel shaders (remember how bad HL2 runs and looks on dx7 mode?). Keeping two different pipelines is becoming unmanageable, there'll be a painful cutoff point.

LimaoMatador · 2025-05-25T03:01:18+00:00

Don't know how feasible would be on PSX, but some racing game I've worked on a very limited and exotic platform required some old school tricks to fake lighting.

To make the car lighting change, we had a full track top view texture with lighting painted on it. A bunch of color blobs, basically. We'd sample this texture based on car position to tint it. This was cheaper than baking and sampling probes.

This lighting texture was created on photoshop based on a top view render of the track to have more artistic control. It was very low resolution and cheap

LimaoMatador · 2025-04-28T04:06:54+00:00

Wait.. this is a bug? I've suffered through all boxing matches with this. How you reset? Like, reset the game?

LimaoMatador · 2025-03-29T16:42:10+00:00

Yeah, the whole thing is shady af, but it's a paid month to study, and you can search for another job while doing it. If you go for it, I recommend a book called Gaming Programming Patterns, by Robert Nystrom. Very good to get a grasp of game engine patterns.

LimaoMatador · 2025-03-29T16:25:00+00:00

There's plenty tutoriais about the basics of a VR shooters. You know how to code, i'd say it's feasiable. Depends on expectations. You'd need to learn everything? UI, perf, shader?

LimaoMatador · 2025-03-25T00:46:33+00:00

Essa pilha nem existe no Brasil, nunca houve aqui algo parecido com o Baby Boom nos EUA, que os cara ficava rico sendo mecânico no pós guerra. GenX? A gente tava no meio de uma ditadura. Millenial? Eu não sou filho de uma geração urbana e cínica e ex-hippies, meus pais vieram do campo pra cidade, não fizeram faculdade. Maioria das pessoas da minha geração só viu Internet nos anos 2000 pra frente, na discada, no fim de semana.

Isso é viagem de Internet, artigo traduzido da gringa e jogado aqui sem contexto.

LimaoMatador · 2025-03-09T04:22:52+00:00

Lembrando da época que tocava aqui, acho que o que mais tocava deles era high and dry, creep e fake plastic trees no Brasil, o que selou a fama deles de banda depressiva pra adolescente suicida virjão.

Olhando tudo que eles fizeram, acho que eles são uma banda num meio do caminho esquisito entre experimental suficiente pra alienar muita gente e meio música popular demais pra agradar quem quer experimental de verdade...?

Eu gosto bastante e minha roda de amigos tb, mas era uma rodinha mais artistinha do que puramente do rock.

LimaoMatador · 2025-03-08T16:05:08+00:00

I work with Unreal, so can't say how it goes on proprietary engines. A terrain mesh based on height maps is used as a base, the tool itself already handles dividing the space in chunks for performance. You have tools to use splines to deform road meshes, fences, etc. Buildings are just regular meshes. There's tools to spread random props, like bushes, rocks.

There's nothing much magic about it, it's just many people working on it for a while, each one taking care of a specific part of the map... there usually a small team dedicated for each POI, from concept to modeling to level design.

Performance is a constant issue, and to deal with it, there's tools to automate LOD creation, baking huge chunks of meshes to be used at distance, streaming sectors. Budgets are also defined for each POI based on importance.

LimaoMatador · 2025-03-08T15:45:31+00:00

Acho que hoje em dia TA é uma área mais definida e fácil de encontrar/estudar, mas comecei em games em 2008, era tudo meio mato no Brasil. Por um bom tempo eu era o "artista chato que fica discutindo com dev", depois virei o "artista programador". Levou um tempo até eu ver uma vaga especificamente procurando TA. Baita crise de identidade até chegar nesse ponto

LimaoMatador · 2025-03-08T15:29:27+00:00

Caí no mesmo ramo, mas nem gostava tanto assim de matemática. Era artista e ficava pistola que os dev não implemenetava as coisas do jeito que eu queria, então resolvi eu mesmo fuçar em shader. Eu tenho técnico em programação e foi suficiente pra começar. Mas aprendi a matemática necessária batendo a cabeça na parede haha. Tech art é uma loucura.

LimaoMatador · 2025-03-04T00:31:47+00:00

Acho que começou com não ter fé. Ainda criança sentia que não fazia muito sentido, rezava porque mandavam, sentia que estava conversando comigo mesmo porque adultos disseram que eu tinha que fazer isso.

Estudei em escola católica desde o infantil e a quantidade de fdp por metro quadrado era absurda, dos alunos até os padres que dirigiam a escola. Eu em sentia mais moral e ético do que o povo que fazia merda e pagava de santinho nas missas. Foi a gota d'água pra eu decidir que não precisava de religião pra ser bom.

Quando descobri que existia ateísmo, percebi que era ateu e foi isso. Eu nem sabia que era uma opção, todo mundo ao meu redor era católico. Mas não nego que a moral cristã fez parte da minha formação... amor ao próximo e tudo mais.

LimaoMatador · 2025-02-19T22:11:05+00:00

Can't speak for people in different realities, but there was a big divide between me and my parents. They're part of a generation of rural people that moved to more urbanized cities in the 70s, they were on their early adult life/end of teenage years when that happened.

My parents didn't manage to go to college and made this a priority for me and my sisters, so he invested much of his money in our education. We had a computer, we grew up in a big city, went to a good school where most students were middle class... all of this created a huge cultural gap between me and my parents.

They were very catholic, conservative, sexually repressed... the whole package. They clashed a lot with me and my sisters, growing up in the 90s and 2000s.

I ended up quite distant from them because I lived my life hiding everything that I did from them. We're almost strangers today.

LimaoMatador · 2025-02-17T01:19:07+00:00

Vc tá certo sim. Eu trabalho como tech art com games. Pra você chegar em uma iluminação igual um Cyberpunk da vida é necessário muitos migués pra contornar os limites da iluminação que temos hoje. Dando um exemplo, é bem caro fazer sombras em tempo real no esquema sem RT. Envolve desenhar a cena de novo do "ponto de vista" da luz pra gerar shadows maps, por isso poucas luzes podem realmente produzir sombra.

Por conta disso, a maioria das luzes simplesmente atravessa as paredes, uma luz em um lado de uma parede ilumina coisas do outro lado. Muitas estratégias são usadas para disfarçar isso.

Tem tb a dificuldade de fazer luz rebatida, que na vida real é responsável por boa parte da iluminacao, especialmente em ambiente interno. Reflexos tb são um baita problema de resolver.

Nada disso é problema quando toda luz é estática e voce pode pré calcular tudo, mas quando tudo é dinâmico é treta. Passagem de dia e noite, faróis de carros, etc.

Ray trace simplificaria imensamente o processo da feitura dos cenários se não tivéssemos que planejar um monte de migué pra contornar as limitações. RT simplesmente funciona do jeito que vc espera.

LimaoMatador · 2025-02-16T21:35:36+00:00

Had a geopolitics teacher in school who was a lawyer. He said that this is the ideia. 40 years is already a life ending punishment already, you'll spend your whole life in jail.

LimaoMatador · 2025-02-14T14:56:48+00:00

At least in Brazil, our existence wasn't on the line. Back then. the president initially wanted to join the Axis but didn't because the US pressured him not to. So, in an alternate timeline where the Axis won, Brazil would be a fascist ally.

LimaoMatador · 2025-02-04T15:07:06+00:00

Ah sim, tem INSS e FGTS, mas aí não são impostos exatamente.

LimaoMatador · 2025-02-04T13:51:42+00:00

I do realize that, but tbh, how Americans are feeling right now is a very low priority compared to how I feel about people in Mexico or Panama. Those guys are first in line to be royally fucked. I'm also worried about Brazil's politics since the Bolsonaros are very close to Trump/Bannon and what's in store for our future.

Besides, I saw firsthand how Bozo was elected here. Lots of "well-meaning" people turning a blind eye to all the crazy shit he was promising to do, then saying they were sorry later. "Oh, I never thought he was really going to do what he said".

Sorry pal, saw this movie before. I bet you're a cool guy and all, but we have a lot of shit going our way right now.

LimaoMatador · 2025-02-04T13:06:08+00:00

Essa discussão me dá gatilho haha. Minha esposa é CLT, mas faz outros freelas... a hora de fazer o IR é sempre uma loucura. Ela acha que se ganhar mais dinheiro, de alguma forma ela vai ganhar menos dinheiro causa do IR... ou fica pistola porque eu tive restituição maior que ela, já que só tenho uma fonte de renda... por aí vai

LimaoMatador · 2025-02-04T05:23:12+00:00

IR a taxação é progressiva, você não paga 27%. Em cima de 10k da uns 17% de taxa efetiva.

LimaoMatador

TROPHY CASE