Check out neat real-time Godot rendering demo Myra
The past few years have seen a steady stream of amazing tech demos showing photorealistic CG characters being rendered in real time inside game engines like Unreal Engine and Unity.
Myra, games artist Andres Hernandez‘s own demo, isn’t quite on that scale, but it’s noteworthy in showcasing what can be done in a mobile game using open-source engine Godot.
Showcasing the graphic potential of Godot for mobile game development
The demo, which was created in Godot 3.4.4, and which runs at 90fps on a Pixel 5 Android phone, shows a static character – a 3D scan from CGTrader – being rendered in real-time in an urban environment.
It was rescaled in Blender, exported in glTF format, and lit in Godot using a directional light matching the sun position of the environment, with lightmaps baked on Ultra quality using five light bounces.
To improve interactive performance, the scan’s original 8K textures were rescaled to 4K for the sky, 2K for the character and the door behind her, and 1K for the floor.
According to Hernandez, the skin material uses subsurface scattering, but the real keys to the final look are the post processing settings in Godot’s WorldEnvironment node.
“Sadly some of the better effects like DoF won’t work on mobile, and SSAO is a resource hog and doesn’t look right. But I set the tonemapping to ACES fitted, and … added a glow with a slight bloom.”
The tonemapping requires OpenGL ES 3, so the demo looks best on recent phones.
According to Andres Hernandez: “For a commercial game, you might want to use GLES2 so more people can run it, but here I was going for the best graphics so I just went for high-end phones.”
Pricing and system requirements
The Myra demo scene is a free download. It requires an Android phone with support for OpenGL ES 3.