Crafting a Better Shader for Pixel Art Upscaling

[@samuelmediani]

The quality and clarity of this video is surprising. You are both a great programmer and educator

[@loco-ok5bi]

and animator

[@X22GJP]

Saying to somebody, "I'm surprised you did so well" is actually kinda' insulting, no matter how good the intent.

[@t3ssel8r]

no harm no foul

[@aarthificial]

Fascinating video! I'm currently using the naïve method of first scaling up by the floored ratio using nearest neighbor and then scaling up the result with bilinear filtering. I need to give your method a try.

[@t3ssel8r]

yo ty for the motion-canvas it made those code animations so painless (unlike almost everything else about making this video lmao)

[@CloudPhase]

I was literally thinking about you throughout this entire video, I even considered reaching out to you about this video as I would love to see you implement something like this in your own game so this is great to hear.

[@clankfish]

i mix you two guys up constantly

[@floppypaste]

​@@clankfish😂 same

[@meme-tastic6089]

@@t3ssel8r BROOO I WAITED FOR 2 YEARS U STILL DIDNT GIVE OUT UR 3D TO 2D ART MAKERRR. PLSS MAKE IT AVAILABLE TO BE DOWNLOADED.

[@MercurySteel]

I didn't understand a single thing but it was fun to watch

[@JJalmanke]

동감한다

[@MercurySteel]

@@JJalmanke я не говорю по-китайски

[@ciso]

​@@MercurySteel I think he he said that he agrees

[@D01Light]

T'as pas tord

[@Jlewismedia]

​@@ciso booga wooga ooga

[@ChillestDudeEver]

After discovering this channel, I binged the content so hard. Concise explanations, logical flow through the explanations, high production quality, practical applications of concepts... These videos are just superb from both an educational and entertainment perspective. Kudos!

[@sgtreckless5183]

This might have been the first complex shader video that I've seen that I was able to follow each step of. Really great vid!

[@LordFaultier]

Your overview of these mechanics have been very helpful and pretty insightful for my own projects. You are truly brilliant! Thanks for putting out such a wonderful content :)

[@pixelarp]

Been waiting for a new upload from you! Last video was a treat! Keep it up, both your game and yout videos!!

[@snesmocha]

always love a nonbullshit full explenation of a system!

[@Jake28]

explanation*

[@snesmocha]

@@Jake28 um, comments already hearted so ummmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm 💀

[@Jake28]

@@snesmocha just let people discover the correction in the replies on their own

[@snesmocha]

@@Jake28I return to this comment 10 months later and am just face palming rn 😂

[@BenjaminCode]

The amount of work you put in this video to teach us something that should be so hard to grasp is insane. As a KZbinr myself, I see all the work there is behind this video and it makes me even more grateful. As usual Tim Soret's recommendations are dope.

[@semmu93]

the animations in this video are seriously jaw-dropping. such a high quality work, very easy to understand and follow, well done!

[@MrA6060]

Dicovered this channel with the absolutely brilliant animation with math video, and it just keeps on providing cool, informative and very well made videos

[@capsey_]

Never thought of using bilinear sampling as box average. Love your videos, they are unique that you deep dive into heavy math and technical details about niche problems while keeping it extremely approachable and entertaining! Visualizations are well made

[@GGCannon]

Holy... I started re-watching your older videos yesterday, wondering when you'd post a new one because it had been a while and just woke up today to this *GIFT*. Love your content and one of my wish is to develop the skill set to do something similar to what you do. Thank you for the video.

[@interessts5033]

I have been watching youtube videos for about 10 years or so and this is no joke the very best one I have ever seen. The amount of work you must have put into this seems so much! Congratulations!

[@bobthedeleter]

always a good day when this guy uploads. keep up the videos, you have a talent for explaining these concepts in such a concise way!

[@retro_marco3363]

Man, you are on some big brain stuff. Amazing results for next level pixel art!

[@PleepusPlopus]

where'd bro go :'(

[@poly_xp]

The video take alloooot if time to make man.

[@thelastfaeinthewoods]

You're back! I'm going to have to try this for one of my projects.

[@OrangeJambo]

I cant tell you how exciting it is to get another video from you! Leaving another comment after watching. :)

[@luckyknot]

I would need a few lives fully dedicated to study shaders to understand this, but even if I got a 2% that's new knowledge for me. Thanks for this superb visuals presentation, and btw your game is shaping up to be a major hit, best luck sir!

[@warmechanic8186]

I've always loved how your videos explain topics in detail while making good use of visual demonstration. Where I would have been stuck on how perspective effects anti-aliasing, I understood in seconds with the warped quadrilaterals.

[@therealgamewizerd]

I'm probably never going to use this specific type of shader ever, but the quality of the video was so good and the production value felt so high that I feel you earned a sub regardless. Incredible video

[@JayFolipurba]

no video in 10 months, I randomly check out this channel and here you are. I just realised that this is probably how all 3D texture editors work, like blender textured view and substance etc. At least it has the same effect. The effect it has on your game is perfect!

[@j_smith_]

Congratulations on the #some3 win!

[@drawnsequence]

I'm absolutely floored by the quality, skill, and knowledge on display here.

[@xlkfromsmwc]

Wow! I made a similar implementation when trying to make multi-colored SDFs, and while I directly went with the fwidth() approach, I hadn't considered updating the uv gradients nor the sampling window! Also having the explanation as to why this works in the first place was amazing! Thank you so much for these videos!

[@ThatTrueCJ201]

This guy is slowly teaching me math better than some of my professors. What is referred to as the deformation gradient in the video, is more generally called a Jacobian.

[@mischahordijk9385]

Amazing vid and your game at the end looks sick, can't wait for the next update on that project. Keep up the stellar work!

[@ShiftyTheDev]

Wow, this was a phenomenal video! Seeing how far your game has developed over the past few years has been great, but these explanations are something in a league of their own. Excellent job!

[@1000orks]

I feel very stupid for having the same problems (for dynamic UI scaling actually) and going with the first algorithm thinking this is good enough. Then encountering all the problems you have adressed in your solution and now realizing I should have just watched until the end and not just vaguely remember. Thank you - this really helped a lot!

[@t3ssel8r]

thanks! I was motivated from hearing similar struggles from several different teams (RadicalFish, Tim Soret, Aarthificial, ...) so I thought I would really cover all the details one is likely to run into when doing this.

[@danielsiriste917]

Your video editing, the way how you explain things and subjects are pretty impressive. You are very talented man!

[@OrangeJambo]

So many titles fail at this scaling issue & when im working & seeing titles come through.. it's a huge pet peeve that these studios cannot figure out what you worded so clearly. Great video! Glad to see this topic arise more, modern pixel genre games all need to take note.

[@sw97058]

This was a game changer. I am working in Godot and with a simple translation this shader is working better than any other option, including heartbeasts jitter-free scaling shader. This is perfectly upscaling my 720p pixel art to 1080p.

[@Tubeytime]

As a digital artist, I understand this concept intuitively, but not mathematically. Fantastic explanation, I'm sure.

[@PMA_ReginaldBoscoG]

Congrats on getting the first place in Grant Sanderson' favourite 25 videos of #some3🎉

[@alextheshinymonkey]

Keep it up! Love how much your content has grown, from the twitter gifs to here, it's great

[@niklas5336]

This scaling method is also useful in video/image display, in particular for solving the issue of temporal aliasing. The popular video player mpv had the (simplified) version of this scaling method for 10 years, as the name “oversample”, for both scaling and frame mixing. VLC 4 has had it a few years also.

[@normalperson4925]

good to see you again!

[@Veptis]

I am very happy to come across this video. It shows a ton of sampling concepts with great examples. Will send it to other people as reference

[@EricBatlle-k7u]

Please never stop doing this so high quality explanatory videos, I'm just amazed

[@yannickleroy7419]

Love how in-depth you go in these videos

[@goldyloxeg]

absolutely incredible. you have a gift for this. amazing visualizations

[@beastbomber2316]

So happy you are back!

[@SpaceflightSimulator_Official]

The production quality of this video is absolutely amazing.

[@1ogic948]

I love learning about technical details like this. Excellently presented. Also, looks like a lot of work got done on the gameplay and such, which is looking very exciting!

[@AntoCharles]

Awesome! Always a treat when you upload! love the detail and editing that goes into these explanations. I could imagine this'll help a lot of people.

[@starbi]

I really appreciate the way you go into great detail about technical aspects that might not seem as important in the grand scheme of things - really perfecting them. I'm sure when this all culminates into your game, you will be able to feel that extra layer of polish. Looking forward to disecting this when I get my hands on it! Great work as always. :^)

[@xx_Ashura_xx]

been watching this series since day 1 and i cant wait to see the final product i love every video

[@denisbryukhachev3663]

Maaaan instant subscribe to your patreon, wish you good luck with your project! Don't forget to add some content before release (weapons, abilities, enemies), this beatiful game must be played by a lot of people))

[@jeffreystephens2658]

Excellent presentation. Very clear, very easy to understand, and absolutely zero frills. This is fantastic content.

[@nibbler7]

BABE WAKE UP, t3ssel8r UPLOADED A NEW VIDEO!!!

[@Mefrius]

I am so happy to see you come back! Your videos are really hard but very useful!

[@GonziHere]

That video is fully amazing, loved every second and stored as a reference.

[@veromolpa]

My guy, your videos are amazingly helpful and well done

[@DarshUK1]

I have no idea what you're on about but the video is weirdly relaxing and the editing is really nice. Great job

[@nameno7032]

God like explaination, please make more of this math related content, the transformation into fwidth is so smooth!

[@AntoCharles]

Congrats on the golden pi creature was a nice surprise to find your video mentioned !!

[@heliusuniverse7460]

I think this will be very useful for my rendering engine. thank you for the amazing explanation

[@bigmojito1765]

This is cool! I've been stuck on working with OpenGL stencil buffers to achieve something similar to octopath, but its inspiring to see progress in this art style

[@FriedBacon88]

I love your videos. Hope everything is good on your end

[@christopherheardalmagrande1372]

Incredible videos. The 3blue1brown of game dev. Tremendously grateful for your efforts!

[@alexpic9821]

I really love watching your videos. Keep up the great work! Can't wait to see more.

[@literallyjeff]

Great video, really stellar visualizations

[@Donahue9389]

You are such an incredible creator and thinker. Just so deeply impressed 🙇‍♂

[@justlearning1881]

glad to see you dev blossom, been subbed

[@mikkelens]

I was pretty unsure at first if your technique was actually prettier than nearest neighboor in my opinion, but turns out that was only an issue because you were zoomed in on a low resolution upscaling. I think your usage of this in the footage you showed of your game was very pretty, super impressed.

[@t3ssel8r]

ahh yeah it's a bit tricky to balance in a youtube video since everyone could be watching on vastly different devices. I might have over-optimized for small phone screens

[@davidrichey2034]

such a high quality video, love it!

[@Eleazarus07]

Yeah! I will play this game. Seeing the techniques is wonderful.

[@AbachiriProduction]

bro you are amazing, your are the one that inspired me to build my game in similar style to yours . keep going bro 🖤

[@gogokowai]

With so much of modern gaming being for-profit shovelware where the devs just throw together premade asset packs and slap microtransactions on it, I have really learned to appreciate the real game dev pioneers figuring out the math and spending hours on problems that others just live with because fixing it would be too much work. Your game has so many interesting systems that the industry typically deems not cost effective or impactful enough to work on, but they're compounding into something amazing that you typically only see from AAA titles that give their developers the time/money/freedom to add polish (which is extremely rare). Most games would only have 1 or 2 of the features your videos cover and base their entire gameplay around it because of how cool it is, and here you are cramming them into a single game just for small aesthetic boosts. I can't wait to see the end result..

[@BirdieDev]

This is unbelievably rad, great work.

[@yellowpie]

I’m about 6 weeks into a class on graphics programming, and this video is a really neat intersection of things I totally understand and things I don’t get at all

[@thygrrr]

I've used several of these techniques, but only had an intuition. Your explanations really expanded my understanding. Your3D stuff looks absolutely stunning, and I'm considering some kind of pixelated look after switching engines from unity to Godot.

[@CristhianMosquera-zr9wj]

I wonder what happened with you. I suddenly remember your video about math and animation and wanted to see more of your work!

[@zanarkandmusic]

I love your art style for your own game! I want to play it!

[@rorypenstock1763]

Wow. Very clever, and very well-explained.

[@Y1001]

High quality work, thank you! :)

[@theDarkerSan]

I was just thinking how to achieve that. great video

[@fletchcanny717]

Thank you! I stg it is impossible to find anyone saying that you can scale pixel art to non integer resolutions! The only exceptions seem to be Casey Muratori, a shader on shader toy, shovel knight, and a video about doing it in Godot by HeartBeast, and even the Godot documentation says it can't be done! Thank you so much for the simple description!

[@dogzer]

It looks really good. I really like this style

[@ben256dev]

This video was very well made! Game looks awesome too as always

[@orbatos]

Great approach, and easy to understand.

[@aloysiuskurnia7643]

The amount of math that goes into just 5 lines of shader code is crazy. It feels satisfying.

[@BaronVonScrub]

This is sick! Makes me wonder a little about how a little temporal would look stacked on top of this? Might look like trash and undo eveything, or might actually lessen the effect of "pixel-jumping" when things move or rotate.

[@astrid.5973]

you make some of the best videos on game programming implementation ❤

[@pheelgad5455]

THIS GUY IS SO FREAKING SMART DAM

[@Blazah99]

Novis game dev enthusiast here. Might is ask from where and or whom you learned and aquired such skills and knowledge? Secondly, if your source/s is out of reach/unattainable for most by either price, availability, complexity, or extrapolation/coherency would it be possible to create a learning class and or course on the web? If not provide or direct us to a list or supplemental courses and or materials or forums you recommend? These questions come from my long love and facination for 2d pixel games and a roadblock i have always have had has been wanting to understand how these sort of things in hames can most efficiently and effectively accomplished while knowing or understanding it deeply. If you read this I thank you from your time whether or not your able to answer and or respond to my questions, requardless... Thanks for the video. 😌

[@Jay-dk6hf]

Amazing production quality

[@MusicalSkele-]

omg a new video after years

[@totheknee]

1:00 - This is really a huge improvement. On a pedantic note, I see there are still some edge artifacts on each "pixel" on the right. This is not a criticism, but just got me thinking, how is it that we can print out a cutout of a pixelated character, and rotate it around in real life without any edge artifacts? At first I thought it is just the nature of scaled-up pixels, but we can do it with a 4k video, so how does it not work with a 4k game engine? Do we just see more noise with video, so our brain accepts it? Whereas the game engine is pixel perfect, so the artifacts show up? I can't figure it out! Edit: Is it just a matter of resolution? Because at 6:19 the pixels look perfect.

[@t3ssel8r]

I purposefully zoomed in a bit to make the artifacts more noticeable for some parts of the video. This is needed because viewers may watch the video on different devices at different resolutions/distances. Of course, in engine, we'd try to render at native resolution when possible.

[@Cakez77]

Wow great video, how did you make these cool animations? Did you use a software for that? Is it difficult to do?

[@TukaihaHithlec]

Excellent way to visually explain very interesting niche concepts! Always love your videos. Perhaps this is handled separately, perhaps not at all, but I’m curious - is gamma correction taken into account when blending colours? Maybe it’s high cost for little change, but I don’t know. It definitely makes it look better, so I’d imagine that if it’s not being used it’s because you looked into it and decided it wasn’t worth it. For anyone else interested, gamma correction is used to adjust light intensity from their display values to their physical values, then do the relevant math, then adjust them back. This is one of the biggest unsung heroes of making video games look more realistic in the last 10~15 years. For an extreme example as it pertains here, suppose you have a checkerboard pattern of 0% and 100% (black and white). Suppose you reduce resolution to half both ways, and now you have a solid grey by mixing half of each, but what does that look like? Intuitively you’d say 50%, but gamma corrected it would be 73%. To understand, get a pixel perfect screen that has the checkerboard in the middle, and each version of grey on either side, then back away or squint until the checkerboard blends into a solid grey. You’ll find that it matches the 73% and not the 50%, which is a result of how our eyes perceive light values. Most game engines and 3D renderers automatically do this now, but most other things do not by default, including OS screen settings and image and video editors. If you made a video about gamma correction I’d share it with everyone.

[@t3ssel8r]

modern engines do all operations in linear color space and only apply the display gamma at the end. that is also what happens here. (Although parts of the video were authored in a video editing software that operated in rec 709, so in this video you could see some variations, but in practice, nobody's gonna notice if the anti-aliasing has a nonlinear gamma) I probably won't make a video about it because it's a subject others are more qualified to speak about (and tbh, I hate dealing with these sorts of bookkeeping problems)

[@iamahtic]

Not only bro is good at making games but the editing is crazy too

[@Mourdraug]

Hello, I'm curious about the edge detection you're using for highlighting/darkening edges in your shader, are you using a sobel algorithm for that? When I tried that I struggled with getting the clean one pixel wide edges

[@MeDjezze]

Great video! I'm always wondering why such basics - and by that I don't mean easy stuff, but fundamental requirements for a game engine - are not provided out of the box nowadays.

[@NickRoyOfficial]

the king has returned

[@JoseALugoR]

You do a great work by sharing your knowledge in such a clear and helpful waym thanks a lot. This is why we humans are awesome.

[@hafl-evil333]

The legend has returned.

[@momiko934]

Return of the king !

[@gregspot9538]

Wooww tu contenido me inspira mucho para contar una historia, me encanta tu crecimiento y como avanzas!