Welcome to Week 52!

Hello and I hope you are keeping well. This week covers graphics, compression and health:

1. Gears 4 - Gridlock’s ocean VFX breakdown 🎨 - Learn how an artist made an animated ocean for Gears of War 4, using Blender and Unreal Engine 4. Very interesting that the wave simulation was done offline, instead of at runtime.
2. Entropy coding in Oodle Data: the big picture 🗜 - I consider data compression to be magic, which is another way of saying I want to learn more about it 😄 RAD Game Tools developed a family of codecs named after sea creatures, referred to as a “sea bestiary”. This post is a high-level overview about how they work.
3. Visibility Buffer Rendering with Material Graphs 📷 - This article contains an overview of how forward, deferred and visibility rendering works, and goes in-depth with how visibility rendering compares to the rest.
4. R-E-S-P-E-C-T: Practical Tips to Prevent Abuse & Build Team Trust ❕ - This is an important talk and I don’t have anything further to add. A must-watch.
5. Low-fat vs. low-carb? Major study concludes: it doesn’t matter for weight loss 📉 - There are all sorts of ways to approach nutrition. Studies like this demonstrate how individualized it is.

Last week I noticed a link in a previous issue went stale - the youtube video had been taken down. Luckily the same content was available in blog form, so I updated the archives with that. If you find any stale or broken links, please let me know!

Questions or comments? Suggestions? Let me know! Thanks for reading and see you next week!

-Karl