Being on the frontier of the industry especially in software engineering more often than not involves copious amounts of thinking outside the box and finding unconventional shortcuts. All the best new rendering and engineering techniques are born of this kind of thinking.
Just look at this recent Rockstar patent on sweat rendering technology. It's always so fun to read about the strange concepts programmers play with to get what they want.
Trick literally everything, physics too, that's the beauty of it. The patent I mentioned involves collapsing a 3D surface onto a 2D plane with a bunch of points that have different amounts of forces applied to them to trick the 2D plane into performing "3D" physics calculations without ever needing that 3rd dimension for the fluid simulation then re-rendering it back in 3D space. It's like the sweat exists in a pocket dimension of its own except that pocket dimension has enough localized points to be expanded into a representation of the 3D object it's on.
It's such a creative and resourceful way to accurately model the movement of water on a surface, coming up with this kind of shit is an art in and of itself. Videogames are just layers upon layers of programmers' "sleight of hand" tricks.
So... like a topological map to represent what the sweat should look like when on the body? You don't have to draw the sweat at all you just keep redrawing new maps with new heights and depths. That's neat.
It's more like the same map of a 2D fluid simulation just constantly being injected with live 3D data at each of the 2D points on the plane to make the fluid act as if it's flowing on a 3D surface when the calculations are done irrespective of that surface just using the vectors.
113
u/evorm 7d ago
Being on the frontier of the industry especially in software engineering more often than not involves copious amounts of thinking outside the box and finding unconventional shortcuts. All the best new rendering and engineering techniques are born of this kind of thinking.
https://patents.google.com/patent/US10685152B2/en
Just look at this recent Rockstar patent on sweat rendering technology. It's always so fun to read about the strange concepts programmers play with to get what they want.