I think this part of the cascade shadow map generation could be improved. Luckily the stuff closest to the camera looks correct, but distant stuff does look off until you get closer and higher resolution pops in.

In the future I'll probably do something similar to what you mentioned and have the cascades use the LODs selected for the main view.

I would say a big part was that I was very interested in the project so even when parts of it were difficult to figure out I kept wanting to come back to it.

The other was breaks. I didn't do this all in one stretch and instead did it in small chunks over time. I wasn't trying to ship a final game or finish as quickly as possible so the time scale was very relaxed.

Then the last was to make sure the process stayed as enjoyable as possible. If I was getting stuck on a problem or if a particular path really didn't seem to be working, I preferred to either take a break from the problem and come back later or find new sources that helped me see if in a different way (or both).

Thanks! It was pretty fun but also difficult and definitely a learning experience.

The demo scenes were all from what is in the Examples/ folder. I am working on getting the 3D assets hosted somewhere (some people made some suggestions in this thread I am going to try) and once that is done people will be able to render all the demo scenes locally. All the assets are either from graphics research samples such as Sponza or Bistro or they were CC licensed on a different site such as Sketchfab. I would have tried Quixel Megascans too but I think you have to buy a subscription.

"Even if that’s the case, is there a huge amount of work to integrate existing models/scenes into your engine?"

It uses the Assimp library which allows it to support things like .obj, .fbx and .gltf. Usually what I do is export from Blender to gltf and ask it to export the textures separately rather than pack them into the binary. Most assets that were designed with metallic-roughness in mind either work immediately or with minimal changes. In my own testing the most frequent things I had to change were if normal maps were inverted (fix by flipping the green channel in photoshop) or if the model exporter set all the metallic values to maximum due to missing data (fix by loading the metallic or metallic-roughness maps in photoshop and flipping metallic channel from max to 0).

Hey cool I'm surprised you found it. With the latest engine version I switched to using static images since it's a lot easier for people to quickly look through. Some improvements have been made since the video and I want to redo it once better image smoothing has been implemented.

And yes! The video was captured in real time on an Nvidia GTX 1060.

(I'm an old man who prefers reading physical books over electronic ones, but I do think that video demonstrates "things" better, especially if it demonstrates the realtime rendering that's a selling point of the engine - and the "kids these days" consume video like it's a breathing-level bodily function)

Looking forward to seeing improved versions.

I'm tipping you've got a pretty bright future!

I decided to add the video link to the readme after you brought this up. Maybe it's better to have it for anyone who prefers it.

Thank you. I enjoyed the video, and it did a great job of highlighting the visual features you achieved!

Impressive! Images AND video is also an option.

I only recently learned about the MPL and I'm a fan. It seems to be a really nice alternative to GPLv3 and LGPL and offers a lot of convenience while still being copyleft.

Thanks! For resources the most helpful were the OpenGL Superbible, learnopengl.com, Foundations of Game Engine Development Volumes 1&2 and the 3D Graphics Rendering Cookbook. Then there were also a lot of web sources that were very helpful such as the Google Filament PBR paper and some realtime rendering presentations from other developers.

Thanks! I've been thinking about contributing to either Godot or Blender. I'm a big fan of both.

Hopefully it helps! More engine documents are something I need to add to my todo list so that they can help the code be more understandable.

Thanks!