@Milkman yeah, I know... I might try and get it removed cos at the moment I haven't got enough time to finish my videos what with other things going on in my sad sad existence :S I am trying however

How does it feel to know that a picture of you has been on the home page for what seems like forever now?

I really liked the video, even though I already have an idea of how shadow maps work. I hope you continue to get in depth on more topics. One criticism is to make sure you try and speak as clearly as possible and maybe slow down a bit. Its just your accent and the quality of the audio makes it a bit hard to follow for people who are not used to that specific accent.

It's like my brain opened up and you plopped in a +1 Int gem. Nicely done!

I like that you said "cool beans" because your beard makes you look like Alan Parrish.

@Robster Thanks for the explanation

Good info mate, interesting perspective, and explained really clearly!

you must get all the ladies! thumbs up!

Great video. I, too, am a beard scratcher.

*fist bump*

I turned my volume way up but I still cant discern his speech. i dunno, its just not crisp and slow enough for me to catch what hes saying.

Great video and info! I had to watch it a few times though to understand completely. I'm not really a person who works with graphics or anything. I just find the "Behind the scenes/How it's done" on video games interesting hehe.

@SUPER_STANO said:

Informative but then I clicked on your other video...HYPNOTIZING

*video*

HAH! Same. I must agree, you are amazing at that!

This was great duder. Thanks for the effort!

Cheers guys, sorry for not getting the next part up fast, I've literally (after procrastinating forEVER) just taken the footage today, and it's my day off tomorrow so that should hopefully be up late tomorrow

I'll try and respond to everyone on here, but sometimes I'm a bit late, so sorry about that:

@Claude Sorry for the lateness, I hadn't seen the shadows in silent hill, until I youtube'd it a minute ago. The shadows seem to be such a large part of that game I think it's only right they have such an overwhelming presence, still fairly disconcerting though (like any silent hill game then)

@lucasrizoli Brief??, hopefully the next one will be more succinct, and include a hamster...

@Peetabix thanks, I grow it myself (the beard that is), although I did shave it the other week and was devestated when I couldn't curl it as good :(

@nick_verissimo Cheers, like I said, hopefully tomorrow or day after, if not I am a bad person

@ectoplasma oh god don't I know about the sound issues, I have a fairly decent mic but no pre-amp, and my voice is usually mumbly anyway, may put subtitles on the next one, (and speak louder), cheers for the offer though, maybe in the future .

@1p these all seem like awesome topics. the first one I did was kinda impromptue, and hopefully the others will be more holistic and easy to cover, I also want to present them in slightly different ways each time.

@Bourbon_Warrior There may be a fix but it'll take quite a re-haul of the renderer, lets hope so though

@bbokhart , @Grimey , @buzz_clik ,@Beomoose ,@Mr_Spinnington ,@JimmyPancakes,@Mordi Cheers fellas, I'll sort another one out asap,

@jorbear yes, yes it could be

@Eviternal I'm in south wales, definitely not tranquil welsh air here. Audio will be sorted out soon, In the latest video I've just this minute recorded I've answered Sweep & Your question about unreal (but I must admit instead of researching and looking up specs and that, I've just theorised...)

@SUPER_STANO thanks, it's much better on fire though. this was going to be a video teaching that stuff, but I got distracted, will carry on showing in depth step by step moves etc in a few weeks.

Solid work, chap.

Thanks for this, would love to see more. This was on my mind since it was so distracting in Skyrim, compared to everything else being beautiful.

Informative but then I clicked on your other video...HYPNOTIZING

this was a fantastic video on an occurrence seen regularly that is rarely explained well. i'd love to see what else you can put into layman's for us

@Robster Thanks for the vid, I think I understood it!

Although may I suggest you boost your mic levels in post, or move your mic closer so your voice doesn't fade into the tranquil Welsh air.

@Sweep said:

Can the next video be on Why Everything Made Using The Unreal Engine Looks Like It Was Shat Out By The Lubricant Monster?

Seconded. Can you shed light on the lack of saturation and contrast in Unreal projects?

Great vid! Sorry I didn't find it sooner, look forward to the next episode.

That was great! It was about a quarter of stuff I expected to be the reason, and the rest was wonderfully detailed I-never-would-have-known-that explanation. Thanks very much for the cool video - hope to see more!

Well, I am definitely following Robster's posts from now on. Thanks for the great info!

Great vid! Especially for a first time vid. Watched it twice to grasp the concept (due to new concepts for me, not due to the quality of the explanation). Would love to see more as they pop up.

I have that same flag, which is also over a window.

Could it be destiny?

@Robster thanks for the answer, that makes sense, looking forward to future stuff dude

Ive got so many mods on Skyrim, it looks great if it wasnt for the shadows, cant wait for a fix for that.

@JDW519 There's a couple of ways of doing reflections, the old traditional way it by actually having a mirrored scene on the other side of the "mirror" (This is for true reflections like when you look directly at a mirror) this has also been used in racing games for shiny road surface . The other way is to "render to texture", which is done by placing a camera facing out of the "mirror", rendering that as an image, and then texturing that onto the mirror object. I'm not entirely sure but I think portal uses this to do the portals (I know narbucular drop did, because the resolution wasn't great on the texture). As for reflections like that on a car or arbitrary surface, you have to use reflection maps ... I'll go through this a bit better in my next two vids. :)

Awesome video, definitely would like to see more of these dude. I actually had a question regarding reflections in games; Why are some games better at it then others? I know nothing about how reflections in games work so I was just curious about the topic in general

This is great stuff and i hope you'll continue the series. It could be like Digital Foundry for laypeople. Suggestions: Why does screen tearing happen? Why is it so hard to prevent clipping issues? Why does high latency in online games cause the characteristic jumping/stuttering motions?

I like it, but maybe u can talk a bit louder in the next video? If u want u can send the soundfile to me and I edit it a bit.

Great video man. Excited to see more!

Thanks for the explanation. Also thats one awesome beard.

This was brief but interesting and—perhaps—useful. Thanks for sharing.

@kickinthehead I'm not in a hurry to do any more on shadows at least not for a while, There are a few ways to decide where shadows are, If you're interested look up Shadow Maps, Ray Tracing, Shadow Volumes, there's probably more that I have forgotten. This is an "old" video in that it's describing stuff that is not so forward looking , nowadays you have things like cascading shadow maps (where the resolution improves the closer it is to the players viewport) and filtering so you can get soft shadows etc (if you have a point light or directional light there will be no fade at the edge of the shadow, which is incredibly unrealistic, to get a light that sharp would be incredibly difficult in real life. And of course light bounces around off surfaces and causes colour bleeding and lighting you may not expect (this is sometimes called ambient lighting, and is faked sometimes with a small multiplier to the colour components in the scene). There's also a tonne of things that are currently happening with Post-Processing and multiple render passes (After the scene has been sttored in a buffer ready to be rendered onto the screen, we can do a variety of things to it. i'll be covering this in an upcoming video). A good place to start if you're interested is http://developer.nvidia.com/content/gpu-gems-part-i-natural-effects and it's free to download and peruse. That and the book Real-Time Rendering http://www.amazon.co.uk/Real-Time-Rendering-Third-Tomas-Akenine-Moller/dp/1568814240/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1329158056&sr=8-1 is probably the first place I would look.

It's all essentially maths and physics, people often underestimate how artistic maths,physics and programming can be. Myself, who went through school wanting to do "arty" things was always pushed to kinda disregard the more sciencey subjects. I now know that this is nonsense, and there should be a larger push trying to get people interested in both subjects.

These videos are not gospel/airtight by any means, there's stuff that I find interesting and I think that other people might like too, They're meant to be a holistic view of something that you can easily get out of your depth in, the one I'm currently working on when I read it out loud comes to about 7 minutes so far, I want to get it to at least half that :S

Thanks for this video! I've always wondered about shadows in games. To someone like me who knows virtually nothing about programming and 3D graphics it's very interesting to learn about something we've all seen but only a few understand.

It would be a lot of work, but a video explaining how shadows are handled in different games would be incredibly interesting. I'd even love just an article explaining the difference between these shadows, Doom 3's shadows etc. Also my mind suddenly explodes thinking of a game like Uncharted where you're walking through a jungle full of shadows!

Or if you know of articles online that have already been written that you can recommend that works too. Thanks again!

The shadow mapping in Silent Hill: Shattered Memories was so bad, that it was good if not great. The shadows seemed to have their own weight and danced in the air.

@MostlyBearded I'm trying! honest :S

@Grumbel

Yeah, of course. This is what I kinda lost in the last diagram, and you're right, it did come across like it was evenly distributed. I'll put my hands up and say that by that point I was too lazy to stick the whole shebang in, so ended up just fobbing off with some unclear text :D

quick early morning sketch of what is happening.

yeah, so as @Grumbel said, the view from the light is always from that view, and as it's projected onto the surface the pixels that make up the depth map can get horrible distorted and enlarged.

beeteedubs I'm working on another one just going over some simple concepts but I'm off for a week so it may be mid week it may be weekend. It's going to be a look at maps and what they are, why we use the, and any foibles they have etc. and I'm not just adlibbing this one, so it should be alot clearer :D

The video was quite good in giving a quick explanation on how shadow maps work, it could however have been a bit clearer on why shadow maps end up aliased and thus answering the original question, i.e. the main reason why they are aliased isn't because they are rendered in lower resolution, but because they are rendered in ligthspace, not screenspace. Rendering them at a higher resolution can make the aliasing smaller, but it can't make it go away completely, as you always end up essentially stretching a lightspace image over the scene and depending from where you look at it, it can always be stretched out extremely and thus pixelate. The lightspace/screenspace aspects where demonstrated quite nicely in the beginning of the video, but then not really connected back in answering the original aliasing problem. The final graphic also obscures the issue, as it makes it look like the shadow is evenly distributed, while in reality the shadowmap gets stretched out onto the wall. That's also why shadows in raytracing look better, they are rendered in screenspace, thus there is no stretching and no aliasing.

Great video. It's good to have those nagging questions put to rest. I fully expect beard writing in your next video (you brought this upon your self).

@blacklab , @stooh,@GlenTennis cheers for the comments :)

@Jazz2 I was once told that my eyebrows were my best feature... I don't know whether to take it as an insult or a compliment.

@tescovee, yeah, still having issues, also going through a bit of a cold at the moment. I'm looking for a vocal coach at the moment to improve my singing (being welsh it's pretty much compulsory), hopefully that will help with my elecution. the other video I've just done is using a shure sm58 mic which although being great for live stuff, if uber bassy. and seeing as I don't have a proper vocal booth setup, I have a metric shit tonne of noise on the high end, (giggidy).

@ZelyreA good place to go with describing field of vision would be to do with angles on lenses (same thing really). It is graphics but at a much more down the the metal mathematical type stage. Viewing Matrices are a pain in the face. with field of view, just show the difference between pictures taken with a wide angle lens (fisheye to about 24mm) then a telephoto (150+mm), the wider the angle the more severe the vertical shapes in a photo with distort when you tilt it, with a telephoto lens, you get a narrower field of vision and therefore there is less effect of perspective and you get a much "flatter" image. ... ok I give up. this IS a difficult topic to explain :D

A really good watch. Looking forward to more vid's and more beard scratching

liked your video pretty interesting, only critique is you kinda speak too soft. Had to crank the volume. Enunciation! :)

Great video. If it were an Ebay seller, you'd get an A++++++++++++++ Very informative video. Would watch again! Also, I kept getting Euwan McGreggor Obi Wan vibes.

I'd love to see a video on field of vision. It's not really a graphics thing, but... sort of is?

I'm constantly trying to explain FOV to my friends and I seem to do a rubbish job.

I'm in love with your eyebrows :)

Way cool. Today I learned...

Nice job! Very informative.

@Robster: ironically, every time I drink I die

@DeF yeah, the beard writing thing was originally at the end and after it I originally said "that probably isn't going to happen", but as I exported it something went wrong, and as it took SO long to export and upload, I didn't bother fixing it. I want to try and get away from the beardiness in the vids to some extent

@Swoxx ,@Oginam,@corganmurray,@xseedx thanks, glad you enjoyed it. like I said previous, I'm going to put more effort into organising the video a bit better next time so it should be shorter and more succinct

@selbie They already have those!... well... Hair Shaders.. that's another topic for another video

@dantey I'm concentrating on realtime stuff at the moment, so games, and also the stuff is all quite backward facing, so after I've explained some of the current trends/quirks in graphics, I may go on to be more forward facing, explaining some of the really up to date stuff

@RagingLion The diagrams and graphics and that are pretty much the only thing that makes me more than a muppet. I like describing things in different ways to different people, because by doing that, you force yourself to get the facts right (or almost right)

@Sweep the next video will cover this (slightly), but maybe it's a video we can do when I eventually come and visit you (it's been too long), I have a vat of lube here with your name on it... also I think we should further our experiments as to whether drinking helps your reflexes on games, I think our super meat boy run was a success, maybe vvvvvv next? everytime you die, you drink...Never not running

@damnable_fiend Well hopefully it described it without going into too much techy stuff, I hate that shit.

@BALE Welsh people, not just the men, as a nation, look squashed, I think it's all the pressure down the mines.

@astonish I know what you mean, hopefully things can be relatively un-busy so I can complete these vids

@TurboMan I had the same dream

@Mcubed Yeah, I know what you mean about not mentioning resolution, it was a point I tried to imply with the rendering a few times thing and the thing. This video was mostly adlibbed, which was a mistake. Hopefully the next one will have less mistakes/ommisions in. Cheers for pointing that out though :)

I also made a mistake that I put in the comments below the youtube video in that when testing the map against an object at a different angle, if you don't give it the right value of bias (how much leeway you give it), you get like a lined look, like slats on a blind. Also... thinking about it more, I forgot to say about the depth map having a small resolution the other way too, in that you can only have from 0 to 1 and that's reliant on the viewing projection and that. I MAY go into that at a different point as it's relevent to shaders and stuff too... hmmm.

@deathstriker666 why thank you. but the thing is now... where do I go from here?, It's on my todo list to get a top hat and monacle, maybe even a cape, but then... I don't know. I was actually considering trimming it down number by number... taking photos at each point, then turning it into a flash app where you can shave stuff into my face... interesting...

Finally! One of the great mysteries (for us lowly knuckle draggers at least) of the HD generation has been solved! Thank you!

... So beard writing? What's up with that!?