Previously Bakery didn't apply AO to light probes or volumes. There was a hidden option... but I didn't like how it worked. Now you can choose to apply it properly.

this is such brilliant work. id never have thought to fit toruses, but nicole's explanation below makes it seem so natural in hindsight. and then packs 9000 other awesome connections to other hard problems into one paper. chapeau to her & the co-authors

Nicole Feng@nicole--f.bsky.social · last wk.

At #SIGGRAPH2026, I presented "points as tori" (PAT) for fast pointwise evaluation of signed distance for point clouds. Some code (Python w/ C++ extensions) and demo up: github.com/nzfeng/point... Contributions from people/LLMs welcome. Explainer thread below for the project: 🧵

Another little feature for today: when baking in full SH mode, you can force Bakery to pack all 3 extra maps in one (with some padding). It avoids using MaterialPropertyBlocks and slightly improves performance on all machines tested (didn't test mobile yet).

Another feature for today: finally managed to hack-ishly write most of the bake metadata into LightingDataAssets (instead of scripted arrays), you can enable it in project settings now. Didn't benchmark it yet, but it can potentially improve scene loading times.

Added experimental Multivolumes to the github version of Bakery. Long story short, it allows you to read all BakeryVolumes of the scene in 1 texture tap in shaders, so it doesn't break any batching, & sub-volumes can still move/rotate dynamically. Longer explanation is in the pic

Bookshop / cafe #gamedev #indiedev

It's that time again, Bakery is on a 50% sale 👀 #gamedev

I will be in Berlin and around, starting next week (and until the end of June)! Anyone wanna hang out? :D

Do YOU need a Linux version of Bakery? Let's see how many people want it :D Ronlaws86 on Unity forum created a poll: discussions.unity.com/t/linux-buil...

Linux Build for Bakery GPU Lightmapper? (Interest Poll)

@guycalledfrank Has written a neat plugin for Unity but it currently only works on windows. They have stated in another thread that it is possible to port it to Linux, however unsure what amount of in...

discussions.unity.com

Updated Bakery's new OptiX9 version to support baking on multiple GPUs in parallel (on github). Currently only affects raytracing passes (not blend/denoise, but its easy to add later). If you have multiple GPUs, you can try it! (I don't but 1 person tested it successfully so far)

I don't post WIP content from Faded very often as there're many unfinished/unpolished parts, but as I already mentioned the crowd sim on twitter... here is the test scene. About 800 characters, 56 bones each, animation is 3.5 minutes (!) with random offset, LOD0 is at ~20k verts #indiedev #gamedev

TIL you can take advantage of anisotropic filtering for directional blurs (!)

Froyok (Léna Piquet)@froyok.fr · 4mo ago

I generate mips and use textureGrad with anisotropy to make it a non-uniform blur, needing only 7 taps per pixel. Final result is really good, and cost 0.4ms (downsample, mip, effect, blit back up).

Came across this handy matrix of accurate but integer-only bit depth conversion formulas: threadlocalmutex.com?p=48

Who could've thought? Bakery is on sale again! (as well as RTPreview) assetstore.unity.com/packages/too... #gamedev

My erosion filter is out! Video, blog post, and shader source. It emulates erosion without simulation, so it's fast, GPU friendly, and trivial to generate in chunks. Explainer video: www.youtube.com/watch?v=r4V2... Companion blog post: blog.runevision.com/2026/03/fast... #ProcGen #vfx #GameDev

I am not sure I can overstate how useful this tool is. Not sure if your game is paging out GPU-memory to system-memory? Well now you know :) github.com/jonasmr/demo...

Low-key added a massive new feature to the github version of Bakery. If enabled, it should noticeably improve export & tracing time for scenes with large amounts of copy-pasted objects (e.g. forests). #gamedev

Do you also dislike how Unity's WheelCollider only casts 1 center ray, so cars jump on every tiny bump? Did you also see 3rd-party assets doing like 16 rays per wheel and thought maybe it's kinda expensive? Did you know that PhysX can actually sweep convex shapes instead of rays? #gamedev

Introducing FragCoord: My ultimate shader editing tool!

I've been working with Spherical Gaussians recently as a representation for irradiance in realtime raytracing. Ended up deriving quite a few new approximations relating to SGs and diffuse lighting. Ended up with something both cheap and accurate. Check it out: www.shadertoy.com/view/WX3fRB

Improvised a little lampshade shader that imitates scattered light from inside. Code and details in the comments! :) #gamedev

New post on how to do real-time diffuse global illumination using surfels and #WebGPU: juretriglav.si/surfel-based... #threejs

The people of Ukraine continue to endure ongoing Russian aggression. From February 2 to 9, we’ll donate 100% of the proceeds from our games and DLC on all platforms to People In Need in support of humanitarian aid in Ukraine.

Marcin Zalewski informed me that his blog post on real-time hair rendering using ray tracing is now available: mmzala.github.io/blog/hair-ge... This is nice work, in which he compares NVidia's hardware accelerated hair to several alternatives, including Reshetov's Phantom Ray Hair Intersector.

There’s also so called AoSoA layout which has benefits of the both (and some GPUs support that 10+ years but APIs never exposed). An example of AoSoA use on CPU also shows pretty solid perf (e.g. : github.com/pm4rtx/Unity...)

GitHub - pm4rtx/Unity-FrustumCulling: An example frustum culling implemented using Unity Burst compiler and native plugin

An example frustum culling implemented using Unity Burst compiler and native plugin - pm4rtx/Unity-FrustumCulling

github.com

Slapped together a dialogue editor for my game in ~3 days, based on imgui-node-editor from thedmd (github.com/thedmd/imgui...). They were previously all just hardcoded inside NPC behaviours and it was a mess to read (+ nobody else could write them), so hopefully it was worth it!

Aand the new Bakery patch is now available on the Asset Store! (and it's still 50% off) assetstore.unity.com/packages/too... #gamedev

Mr F@guycalledfrank.bsky.social · 8mo ago

If you had an issue on a 50xx GPU after that patch, please try patching again - I've just updated it. Many thanks to @imlexz.bsky.social for testing!

If you had an issue on a 50xx GPU after that patch, please try patching again - I've just updated it. Many thanks to @imlexz.bsky.social for testing!

Mr F@guycalledfrank.bsky.social · 8mo ago

Bakery has been updated to support the new drivers! Please try updating via github/patcher. If no issues are reported within the next week, I'll update the Asset Store version. The new version should also bake faster (!)

The black friday sale is over, but now there's a new one! Because Christmas is near or something? I guess! #gamedev (And if you're on a >= 590 driver, please try the github patch! It's almost ready for the Store release)

My "No Graphics API" blog post is live! Please repost :) www.sebastianaaltonen.com/blog/no-grap... I spend 1.5 years doing this. Full rewrite last summer and another partial rewrite last month. As Hemingway said: "First draft of everything is always shit".

No Graphics API — Sebastian Aaltonen

Graphics APIs and shader languages have significantly increased in complexity over the past decade. It’s time to start discussing how to strip down the abstractions to simplify development, improve pe...

sebastianaaltonen.com