How do games render their scenes? | Bitwise



How do games render their scenes? We’ll discuss how oldschool 8-bit games rendered their scenes and gradually move our way towards modern 3D rasterized games. You’ll learn about rasterization, anti-aliasing, shadow mapping and more!

A lot has happened the last year in my life regarding moving, a new job and health issues, which is why I have not been able to make a lot of videos, but all is fine again now and I chose to work part-time so that I can spend more time on making videos more regularly! 🙂

I also created a Patreon page on which I release e.g. source code and have a tier option that includes having a personal chat with me!

My patreon: https://www.patreon.com/digidigger

References
OpenGL Game Rendering Tutoria; How Shadow Maps work https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EsccgeUpdsM

8-bit guy https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tfh0ytz8S0k
Doom WASN’T 3D! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zb6Eo1D6VW8
3D Graphics: Crash Course Computer Science https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TEAtmCYYKZA
How real time computer graphics and rasterization work https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=brDJVEPOeY8

Doom engine wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doom_engine
Doom engine techniques http://qzx.com/pc-gpe/doom.txt
Doom engine source code review https://fabiensanglard.net/doomIphone/doomClassicRenderer.php
Doom wiki https://doomwiki.org/wiki/Doom_rendering_engine

Rasterization in one weekend https://tayfunkayhan.wordpress.com/2018/11/24/rasterization-in-one-weekend-part-i/
Rasterization a practial implementation https://www.scratchapixel.com/lessons/3d-basic-rendering/rasterization-practical-implementation
Ray casting tutorial https://permadi.com/1996/05/ray-casting-tutorial-table-of-contents/

Source

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32 thoughts on “How do games render their scenes? | Bitwise”

  1. This is the best videogame/industry explanation video I ever seen in my whole life. You just understand lots of concepts you always heard about but no really know how they work or what really are. Thank you so so much and please keep going with theese!!

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  2. For those interested: textures like normal maps, metallic maps, and smoothness maps, ambient occlusion maps, etc can be layered on top of the UV-color map (the texture) to create even more detail, and tell the engine which parts of an object is shiny, rough, rigid, or dark! This is known as PBR (physically based rendering) and is what has allowed us to make extremely realistic looking objects in 3D virtual environments

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  3. its amazing to see you posting again! your videos always get me so excited!
    the fact that doom uses a tree structure for level data/rendering is really cool!
    thanks for going into so much detail in your videos, they are always such a joy to watch~

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  4. Dude I just remembered this channel and wanted more videos like the terraria and portal one and decided to look up the video again. Low and behold there was another video like those.

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  5. Your videos are a fantastic introduction to understand how game mechanics are implemented! I've been trying to understand these mechanics for years, but your videos are the first that really allowed me to understand what's going on. Thank you!

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  6. Thank you so so much for sharing your knowledge and research in a way that everyone can understand! It would be great to have another video of Game Plunge.

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  7. Did you just totally skip over 2-bit and 4-bit colour? You've fallen for one of the classic blunders!
    What's usually considered 8-bit art is not art that uses 8-bit colour; it's art that was suitable for 8-bit computers. The NES for example has only a 64 (6-bit) colour palette, and at any one time it can only display 13 of those colours. That's just a fraction of the 256 colours you can display with 8 bits yet we call those 8-bit graphics.

    I'm also a bit disappointed that you didn't mention any of the math used for actually figuring out where objects get placed on screen or any details about the core rasterization algorithm that turns those mathematically perfect triangles into imperfect pixels… though I guess it's fair since showing a bunch of math probably isn't that good for audience retention 😛

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  8. I like this video but watching it as someone who's made 2D game engines is painful, most older games used palletted graphics, where a sprite would have 1 byte per pixel which would be an index on a table of colors(usually 3 byte), sprites would also have a palette index which would point to which palette to use, some early polygonal engines like Quake also used this but it stopped being used that much in the mid-late 90's

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