Karl
@hexaquo.at
Researcher, teacher and activist somewhere at the intersection of landscape perception, graphics programming, open source, and climate change. Working on VR landscape visualization with Godot. Maintaining Geodot: https://github.com/boku-ilen/geodot-plugin
I spent the last month obsessed with finding colors that can't be displayed on a conventional screen. This is what I found. moultano.wordpress.com/2026/06/19/w...
Where to Find the Colors Your Screen Can’t Show You
An atlas of the vibrance of the real world
moultano.wordpress.com
For anyone who couldn't make it to GodotCon, the recording of my talk "Integrating Vulkan Ray Tracing in Godot" is now up on YouTube! #Godot #Vulkan #RayTracing
Integrating Vulkan Ray Tracing in Godot – Antonio Caggiano – GodotCon 2026
YouTube video by Godot Engine
youtube.com
INTRODUCTION TO SPHERICAL HARMONICS FOR GRAPHICS PROGRAMMERS finally done. gpfault.net/posts/sph.html
Introduction to Spherical Harmonics for Graphics Programmers
gpfault.net
Did you know you can set up a scene and render it to a texture without any nodes in #Godot, by directly using the RenderingServer? We automatically generate billboard sprites for meshes this way. There's not much info about the RenderingServer online, so I wrote about it: hexaquo.at/pages/using-...
'A simple (perfect) life' - my spring landscape is finally finished! An apple orchard in bloom, old railway, sheep with their lambs and an allotment being prepared for growing :) Zoom in to see all the other tiny details too... I think this might be my favourite aerial embroidery I've ever done!
Implemented a variable-density Poisson disk sampler as a C++ GDExtension for #Godot: github.com/boku-ilen/go... It generates random points with a variable density, based on e.g. an image. should be very useful for scattering vegetation. based on this article: www.vertexfragment.com/ramblings/va...
I just open-sourced a real-time datamosh CompositorEffect for Godot 4.4+ using motion vectors and temporal accumulation. Demo scene and presets included. github.com/goosegarden/... #Godot #gamedev
Lens Flare update: exposed all configurable parameters now. There's probably still a lot of potential for performance optimization, but I'd say it's somewhat usable :) You can check it out here, should work in any project (though requires some HDR care): github.com/kb173/godot-... #Godot #gamedev
Gaussian splats are quite the rage lately (for good reason). Yet the technique is actually quite old! 35 years ago, Lee Westover created the worlds first splat with the “UNC Head” dataset. A high-res CT scan...much too detailed for computers at the time.
More work on procedural lens flares in #Godot. If you want to have a look at the (still very messy!) code: github.com/kb173/godot-... Outline of how it works: 1. Clip bright spots from the rendered image 2. Warp these spots to create ghosts and a halo 3. Blur 4. Overlay based on a dirt texture
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
Finally learning CompositorEffects #Godot Lens flare based on this blog: john-chapman-graphics.blogspot.com/2013/02/pseu...
Good idea using gaussians for tiled floor vegetation: yunfan.zone/gswt_webpage/ #3dgs #gamedev #rendering
I often talk about bent normals for billboards, and I keep having to mention the "if (!FRONT_FACING) NORMAL = -NORMAL" workaround for correct backface lighting. I realized I could fix that myself, so I opened a PR for an intuitive material option and render_mode: github.com/godotengine/... #Godot
I don't understand how they could get (?:(?:\"|'|\]|\}|\\|\d|(?:nan|infinity|true|false|null|undefined|symbol|math)|\`|\-|\+)+[)]*;?((?:\s|-|~|!|{}|\|\||\+)*.*(?:.*=.*))) so wrong
On my way home from #GodotFest. Thanks so much to everyone for this incredible event! Hope to see you all again soon :) My presentation on foliage rendering in #Godot is already up on YouTube: www.youtube.com/watch?v=U2nB... And I also shared my slides here: slides.com/hexaquo/plan...
Karl Bittner: Plants, Polygons and Pixels: Large-Scale Vegetation Rendering in Godot #GodotFest2025
YouTube video by GodotFest
youtube.com
I’m now seeing a talk about large scale vegetation rendering in Godot, by Karl Bittner. He mentions there is an open source alternative to speedtree, which he has barely heard mentioned: EZ tree: www.eztree.dev It even has an in-browser 3D viewer in which you can try different seeds for the trees!
🔜 #GodotFest Want to see these slides (and many more) live? Then join my presentation on November 11th at GodotFest in Munich :) #godot #gamedev
