Robster

@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. :)

@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

@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

@Shun_Akiyama Totally, I'll get to work on my gravity defiance

edit all the nekkidness out, and they might be publishable, still think we should do more, people! we need suggestions for really awesome video games to play whilst drunk

@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

@fritzdude, @huntad , @still_i_cry, cheers fellas, and yes it hurts when you whack yourself in the particulars/head. After 5years of doing firespinning i've never been burnt though, singed yes... start with something light by all means, but for the contact stuff you need something grippier and heavier.

I HAVE to upgrade to HD uploads, it looks so ...non contrasty.

anyway, Here's the first in another series of videos, going through from the basics of firespinning (both staff and poi), and onto some more tricky/impressive moves , also there'll be some fire vids up once I brave the cold and get out there.

I don't do akido or use a bo-staff btw, I do it for fun and shiny things.

cheers for taking the time :)

@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...