Vertex colors: the hidden workhorse of shaders – introduction to realtime lowpoly vertex painting

I also use GN to separate/merge vertex color channels like that, ( or vertex color master addon but it had other drawbacks). I wish it was done properly, but sadly there is no developer excited about vertex painting (i wonder why :p).

That technique of using the UV map as a cheap way of getting more channels is really cool!

Impressive insights, thanks! This really gives a clear view of what’s coming in the crypto space. For further details, take a look at my bio. I'll definitely be following your updates closely!

huh, I've never seen UV coordinates used like that, interesting

I think this is my favorite talk so far, straight to the point and full of actionable advice

Interesting, I've never considered this. I've always thought of vertex colors in the same vein as the benchmark engine. I just saw it as a novel tool for visualizing

Thank you ma'am. This is awesome in so many ways. Pure gold stuff.

Loved this from the very name! I love using vertex painting even on low poly stuff, it can help you drive all sorts of high quality shader settings

I am specialized on making the content for some very old game (Richard Burns Rally from 2004) which offers no in-game lighting at all, so everything has to be baked into vcols, but it turned to be surprisingly powerful. Once you bake GI into vcols, suddenly even such old game can suddenly look nearly photorealistic (especially in overcast weather where those fancy modern shaders wouldn't make much difference anyway), while such game still runs in thousands fps on average HW, you don't need to waste space for lightmaps etc.
Sure this has some limitations and you need to care about the topology much more (you need to especially avoid overlaps and make sure the geometry is connected and subdivided enough to get the desired detail in vcols), but still I think it is a very underrated technique.

Thank you

I follow the similar mindset in our own game but I never thought of using the UV coordinates. Bravo!

I will add one awesome optimization I did for my game. I didn't need UVWs for any meshes (no textures or lightmaps) so I was able to remove all UV channels from all meshes and reduced the vertex count substantially. In 3ds Max this is the UVW Clear modifier, but I don't know the Blender equivalent.