SHADOWS! // Hazel Engine Dev Log

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#Hazel

[@mihail2607]

You now have to do intros with the kitty every time.

[@justVontadeh]

for archival purposes. We need to get to see how fast she grows and leave that documented!

[@benu5365]

Yes she looks so cute

[@Rallion1]

I really enjoyed this blog style. The code stuff is cool but hearing your thought process and getting deeper into the concepts like this is far more valuable imo

[@Red-di7zb]

Отличное имя у кошки =)

[@kovesik]

А как ее зовут?)

[@kovesik]

Черт, начал смотреть вчера, а досмотрел сегодня, поэтому забыл, this is ОЛИВКА!

[@cunningfox146]

Он русскоговорящий? Нифига, не знал

[@alexanderhuliakov6012]

Starting a video with a cat is the best. (когда услышал имя на русском немного офигел сначала)

[@woobie5649]

Приветствую земляков ! )

[@F0RIS]

аналогично, произнес хорошо просто)

[@Kitulous]

@@F0RIS Ян Черников (имя Черно) вам о чем-то говорит?

[@tttopcattt]

This is absolutely great stuff! You're work resonates to me incredibly! I'm both inspired and humbled by this type of effort. To be working on so much independently is phenomenal!

[@UncoveredTruths]

> "maybe in a few years I can just raytrace" HOO WEEE BOY, God I know that one all too well. I did a similar thing. I was working in reinforcement learning and there were some key problems, so I thought "oh you know I'll go do some work in supervised learning, hopefully by then the problems are alleviated". So a year goes by and the field has improved somewhat, but now the mindset is shifted toward mega-compute. So I think to myself, "okay well ill go spend the time in pure mathematics, and hopefully by the time I get back things will be more stable ...".

[@timbenton450]

CS student here. My school doesn’t have any game-related courses, so you ARE my game/C++ prof. More videos? Yes please!

[@ilyachistyakov47]

Оливка - огонь имя! Пусть теперь Оливка будет писать код с нами!

[@Cd5ssmffan]

@Saran Pranavv Olive - lit name. Let Olive write code with us now.

[@rishabg5583]

what language is this?

[@bamberghh1691]

@@rishabg5583 russian++

[@ste1516]

@@bamberghh1691 kek

[@jodyruben4097]

glad to see you back with the engine ! really enjoy all the devlog :D

[@cjvink]

I really love this devlog style! It's so valuable to hear your thoughts and process.

[@mneher97]

I really like this new style of going over your failed attempts. It helps in understanding your thought process! Keep it up, really nice video :)

[@abdelhaksaouli8802]

4:12 the funniest thing ever heard since long time

[@sasuke2910]

This is a great vid, I'd love to see more general videos like this where you pick a topic and talk briefly about different implementations and their tradeoffs. It saves me a lot of research!

[@Borgilian]

This looks really good, dude. Congrats!!

[@Domarius64]

4:26 "The Rabbit hole of Shadows" sounds like a creepy obscure novel.

[@Mr-ut7nj]

"Almost none of the samples you find, are scalable" ABSOLUTELY!

Very nice and huge thanks for giving us a fantastic insight into what goes on behind the scenes of writing a game engine. Much respect, Sir.

[@mastershooter64]

next video: olivka: hey guys my name is the cherno and welcome back to the hazel dev log

[@thehambone1454]

Love this type of content! Need more theory out there! Especially for shadow mapping, ive had a hard time with it...

[@aviationbutterr]

I love working on my engine while watching you.. So relaxing lol

[@LogicEu]

It looks amazing!! Congratulations!

[@kariakistephen508]

Dude man you never give up!

[@TheIgoorR]

Wait, Cherno, just realized... This was russian accent at "Оливка"?) Я в шоке) P.S. Крутое имя у кошки)

[@richardtoth7240]

dude! You are my favourite youtuber! Just love watching theese in hope of some day I'll understand it all

[@unn0wn224]

TheCherno : Explains shadow that .. shadow these.. Meanwhile Me Who doesn't even knows how to print something on the console : hmm...I see so that's how it is..

[@goodideas5659]

Nice ! - adding shadows really makes the scene look so much better. Your engine is coming along nicely - congrats. My skill set is very low in game engines so most of your stuff is way above my understanding but can see all the hard work you have put into it at least...making my first game currently using an old game engine on it's last legs I guess but not terrible either (CopperCube 6) as I originally didn't want to learn to code at all....funny how that never eventuated. I now do 99% of my game in Javascript now...erhummm...

[@zephyrox2]

I liked this devlog format very much!

[@flobuilds]

Looks really good love the devlogs

[@geraltt1455]

your scene and ui looks great

[@Tetsujinfr]

Great job on Hazel shadows, keep it up!

[@pronova159]

Yes, yes. More of this please!

[@Mystixor]

Really sleek! I'm not close to being a game engine developer, but implemented shadow mapping a few months ago nonetheless. It took me quite a while and the shadows look very rough and overall just not polished but it was really fun and it makes all the difference when you're looking at your scene during development and it has shadows vs everything's kinda flat ;)

[@mohammednihad6755]

I love this style of videos

[@amekgomo4578]

love the dev logs ngl.

[@VlaDexa_MAX]

Оливка. Я просто расплавился в улыбке

[@microgamestation]

I really enjoy these more rambling videos.

[@AlexGolunga]

Hey Cherno, as someone interested in getting into audio programming, I’m wondering to what extent will Hazel have an audio engine?

[@zzocker77_hd26]

awsome work.

[@aryanparekh9314]

Love your videos 😻

[@bastelwastel8551]

Your content was already great.. With the cute kitten you just won the internet 😻

[@alexo.o418]

Shadows are such a fun and frustrating topic. A few alternative/complimentary techniques to shadow maps are screen space shadows which can be combined with shadow maps to enhance small details and soft shadows using signed distance fields. SDF shadows are used by the unreal engine to shadow objects outside the shadow map range. An interesting enhancement for cascaded shadow maps is a tight fit to the depth buffer range. This can be achieved by creating hierarchical depth containing the depth min/max. The light matrices can then be calculated in a compute shader to keep everything on the GPU. I think the Order 1886 used this technique. Shadow map sampling also has a bit of varierty. Besides the traditional "blocky" PCF sampling a lot of people use per pixel rotated poisson disks. An alternative is to use a spiral pattern as those have less sample overlap when rotated. And of course going fully stochastic with a low sample count and cleaning up with TAA. Another interesting approach is using screen space directional occlusion to approximate short soft shadows. Although I believe this is mainly used to provide shadowing for lights that can't afford a shadow map. This was originally used in Cryengine 3 and more recently in the Demon's Souls Remake.

[@elirannissani914]

6:06 Yes! Yes! Yes!

[@amaanmahammad2296]

Great video! Cute kitty

[@PastaPig]

Hey, very cool video. I was just curious about something as I tried to implement PCSS a little while back, and I would have issues where if one object was directly in front of another (like a pole in front of a wider pole) with the light facing them dead-on, the blocker search would give a value closer to the front pole's depth when sampling for points that are behind them both, and the resulting shadow would have a high-penumbra streak in the shadow of the pole in the back. So essentially there would be like an inverted shadow of the front thin pole behind the back wide pole. Tweaks to the numbers for blocker search size and everything could fix for very specific cases, but never for general cases. Did you ever encounter this issue, and if so how did you work around it? Do the cascades fix this issue, as I did not get around to implementing those before dropping for variable penumbra for the time being, in favor of another solution (currently using prefiltered EVSM and it looks really nice, but that contact-hardening is still so nice).

[@calecacciatore5422]

"i should have just done what i was supposed to do.." haha, that s me, thoughts about my life, where it s going, every time.

[@luandkg]

Best intro, hello Cherno, continue the Data Structures !

[@BlenderhilfeDe]

nice cat! ahh shadows i mean... and really good video as allways! smooth :)

[@coolumar335]

Congrats on the kitteh - thanks for adopting :)

[@pouria2728]

Hi Cherno, How did you make this engine? I mean how did you start? You just made a file named hazel.cpp and started coding ? or you're using something like Qt Creator for the GUI?

[@motbus3]

doing with hazel and my life lol I've been thinking a lot about the last part too

[@likestomeasurestuff3554]

The kitten killed me, thanks

[@maxemore]

The next obvious step, of course, is to teach your cat how to code in c++

[@elliotfriesen6820]

Woah that editor looks really good

[@jacasch3164]

It would be nice to have other videos where you explain (conceptually) the algorithms for soft shadows or depth of field or what not.

[@rishikeshjoshi7786]

Just came here to thank cherno for everything he is doing . His C++ series and OpenGL series is what I am currently learning. Once I start earning I will surely contribute to Cherno . I love your efforts Cherno. I am currently 21 and love programming. Once again thanks and love from Uttrakhand , India.

[@Meyu-Sys]

Well I am doing the same I am from maharashtra

[@rishikeshjoshi7786]

@@Meyu-Sys What do you do ? College ?

[@Meyu-Sys]

@@rishikeshjoshi7786 I am in 7th standard

[@rishikeshjoshi7786]

@@Meyu-Sys Great ! All the best bro.. Make sure you don't mess up your genius by getting in rat race of marks and grades in school.

[@Meyu-Sys]

@@rishikeshjoshi7786 I don't really care about marks to be honest nor do my parents

[@PedroOliveira-sl6nw]

Next time, we're doing Sprint Retrospective live :D

[@eedle4852]

Оливкаа!

[@nikolaiarsenov1595]

Nice talk man! Beautiful kitten :3

[@ghouldrago360]

Good job

[@dingoDogMan]

He's back with a brand new cat!

[@Lurieh]

About what you said in the beginning. I find working on code and pretty much any other creative work at the same time to be very hard. Let's say the brain is a workshop, once I've put out all the tools needed for coding, there's no space left for the tools needed by others type of jobs and I have to put all your code tools back in the cupboards before starting another job. Otherwise it's too messy to make sense of anything. But I know someone that doesn't seem to have this issue.

[@LioncatDevStudio]

0:01 Ahhh yes the programmer cat has come! We will all be saved now!! Hail the programmer cat!!

[@catinwall4256]

I like this style.

[@Imaltont]

I would say best solution for implementing some algorithm would be to mostly use the paper, and use some "random" code from github for reference if/when you you get stuck from the pure paper (which will happen). Haven't done this a lot for 3D graphics algorithms (yet), but it was my goto when doing more advanced AI algorithms in uni.

[@ventusstrife6715]

Great! I would like to ask if there is idea of adding reflection to C++, and what other main functions of reflection in game development besides serialization and development of engine editors. Thanks!

[@__jan]

Static reflection may come in c++23 or c++26

[@ventusstrife6715]

@@__jan that means we have to wait for 3 years at least...I.ve write an static reflection for cpp....But I don't know the specific usage requirements of reflection in game development to improve it.

[@mettaursp309]

@@ventusstrife6715 One use case that I use it for is scripting language binding. If you can bind member functions to a scripting language and create an API with that it'll drastically increase the flexibility of the engine. I did mine for Lua binding, and the method that I used was I defined functors to pull individual values off the stack, and called the member function with std::apply and an array of those functors. It's quite a bit more involved than member/data reflection, but it's well worth the investment.

[@thegnosticatheist]

Oliwka

[@IlknurMustafa]

Hi Cherno, do you think it would be possible to post your livestreams for those who can't join due to timezone differences?

[@motbus3]

don't knoe if I missed, but the shadow map is applied to the texture of the object?

[@revan1139]

Shadows, finally!

[@jonesy_b]

OMG THAT CAT IS SO CUTE

[@blackfun4448]

KEEP IT UP :D

[@user-uk8kh7ev6s]

"Пацаны, я Оливку поймал!"

[@epic1343]

YEESSSSSSSSSS

[@GrayFoxGamingHD]

What do you want to archive versus what Unreal Engine 4 already does ? Technically/comercialy wise.

[@rostislav3470]

Люблю оливки

[@michaelmakam8336]

Random question but where did you get your yellow duck water bottle from??

[@nextlifeonearth]

Are you also going to implement shadow maps/baked lighting? I imagine that as long as one doesn't do something as silly as dynamic time of day, this could be a giant win in performance and visuals. It would probably need to be ray traced with something like Radeon Rays or something. I imagine Cinema 3D would be cost and license prohibitive.

[@neilwaghmare6283]

I did not know that there were so many ways to render shadows and it was so complicated. I thought it was easy.

[@madeso]

9:39 (ish)... I hope when you are copying open source code into your own (not open source) code you are complying with the license. A quick search on github I found both things that are ok (mit och apache 2 for example) but also many things that are not (no license)

[@theRPGmaster]

Accidental Swenglish :)

[@movax20h]

For debugging things like cascades (and many other things in fact), you should have two types of cameras. 1) The game camera, that is what your rendering is based, all the frustrums, cascades, culling, LODs, etc. 2) Debug / editor camera, which allow you to actually move around, and see things from different viewpoints, without affecting any. If there are some shaders that take into account some view vectors, you might have additional option which camera to use.

[@meanmole3212]

Or just use RenderDoc.

[@jackwhite3468]

I like the style and length. maybe a bit too much talk in the beginning, I would have loved to see some of those other github projects you tried and what was wrong with them. Keep up the great work!

[@kursatyakupkukul7670]

what kind of music is that? I like it, feels like I could write code hearing that

[@MrGr33n_]

I didn't follow the channel much, but what is the Graphic API you are using? I myself work on part of an engine, but in Java. Also i really agree with you that nothing is perfect out of the box online(people code. My Tesselation wasn't perfect actually it wasn't at all, and then i never got to add the Cubic Bezier algorithm to roundup the edge and in the end i gave up on having beautiful edge for it haha :P.

[@homelikebrick42]

The graphics API is OpenGL and Vulkan

[@GamingMyWholeLife]

Have any thoughts on clothing physics in Games? I know it's expensive and so most developers will use it as little as possible (like a Scarf or single item) but it's an area I always wanted to see used more. Graphics have come such a long way, however often character models just have a solid mesh on them with great texture work. Do you see that changing anytime soon?

[@SimonBuchanNz]

There's plenty of secondary animation in new gen games, especially Demon's Souls, and trailers seem to show a lot more coming. It seems they were mostly held back by the weak CPUs in last gen consoles, so I think you'll get your wish.

[@gelis07]

The sky lighterally made a night and day difference (pun intended), but really it made the scene from quite ugly to amazing.

[@rootwayder77]

Are you on USA or ....? Where can I get the hazel game engine demo thingi?

[@lethaldumpster2699]

To some degrees, OMG this is better than UE4s lighting controls.

[@treyquattro]

kitteh!!! Channel just became 100% more interesting

[@jacasch3164]

To me it looks like the shadows are only softened in one axis (towards the light) is that for performance reasons? The shadows look really good though. I think the next step would be to integrate some nice Ambient Occlusion/GI.

[@cjaay4359]

I remember turning on PCSS in GTAV and Far Cry 4 really tanks the performance of gtx 970

[@werdox]

yeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee

[@muhammadalwi-956]

Hello cherno, i started play NFS No Limits game from 2018.i see your name "Yan Chernikov - Game Engine Team" in the credits.btw, that game has a really good graphics for android and ios game compare to grid 2 android port.

[@mynameupdatesannually]

оливка))

[@theblubus]

I like the LGR music vibe here :)

[@l1ghtsaber79]

ok. now after reading the paper, i guess i can go to github and find Hazel

[@VE47ER]

So cute kitty. She needs more camera time... 😆

[@poohshmoo9892]

AWEEEEEEEEEEEEE

[@itsjusttmanakatech1162]

Idk if this already exists. But, they should make a method where it combines shadow mapping and ray tracing. So for complex parts of shadow use ray tracing and use shadow mapping for other parts.

[@user-tn9pq7bv5h]

hi! what did you user for UI? its c# WPF?

[@robertmoats1890]

The first time I tried to implement shadowmaps into my custom DX12 game engine, I tried to store the back buffer render target into a variable and re use that variable every frame, not even considering the fact that double buffering will mean that my variable is the wrong texture view pointer on every other frame. This lead to DirectX throwing a fit with unreadable _com_error exceptions, and me spending an entire day hunting down the problem. Not a fun experience. These are the things that get game developers. Trying to do complex stuff is not the problem. It's making stupid mistakes while in the process of trying to do the complex stuff. Anyway, I'm still in the process of implementing my shadowmaps, and just dealing with the shadowmap "view projection" transform is tough enough. In my engine, each visible room can have its own shadowmap transform, and I have to combine them all together into an overhead view that projects onto a single depth texture, where closer rooms are rendered at a larger scale. So I have to implement some form of "uv packing", where each room acts as a separate island. Lots of respect for implementing this into a custom game engine. It takes some work.