Woah, it's been almost 6 months since I've posted a blog! I haven't been around here for a while, but I'm hoping to get back into this community, been missing it :). This blog would be insanely long in text, so time for a picture blog!
June - Month 1 - Birthday!, complete Sleepy Robbers my longest game to date(30mins).Not much here….July - Month 2 - Performed comedic play based on 2012, started work on STS:The STS stuff is next month :).August - Month 3 - Completed Mouldy Apples, a board game, a device, and a short film on werewolves!:
Moudly Apples!
The Tea Heater Xtreme! It sort of works, you just put the cup of tea on it and it heats it up!
A 3d render of it (Blender).September - Month 4 - Started on Unity Asset Store, created portfolio, updated the crap out of website, added Old House Asset, restarted Morte Grimm!:Portfolio
The House Asset - Asset Store
Screenshot of reboot of Morte Grimm, more info on website.October - Month 5 - Wrote overview of Morte Grimm and created the engine (Movement, inventory, dialogue trees), began work on Shader Sandwich, and got results from STS. I got two prizes, over $100:
November- Month 6 - Made short animated film Charlies Rainy Day, wrote the start of a short detective story, almost finished Shader Sandwich.
Charlies Rain Day!
Procedural terrain generated in the shader - Shader Sandwich!
Realtime water and grass using custom shaders.
Shader Sandwich! - Unity ThreadThe Details!Unity Asset Store:Putting things on the Unity Asset Store has been a pretty great experience. It was fairly simple and the pay is pretty fair (I get around $100 per month from just my house asset). It is recommended that a portfolio exists, they thought I had ripped the house from a game before I put it together :D.Shader Sandwich:Shader Sandwich is a layer based shader editor. I'll be putting it on the Asset store for around $30-$40 dollars. It's pretty powerful, just check out the thread :D. I would love to have some suggestions for it, and if you want I'm happy to send out a private beta, just PM me :).Anyway, I'm hoping to be a bit more active here from now on. I've missed a few competitions, sorry about that…. Thanks for taking a look!
Wow—you've gotten even better at this. From an artistic standpoint, refer to your last render, with the waving grass. Please don't make all the grass point the same direction at once. It looks so horribly fake when you do that. Use two or three octaves of sine waves. You can keep the one you have, but create a second octave that factors in each blade's x and y coordinates (or x and z coordinates if you're a Microsoft ninny) multiplied by some small factor. From there, either add a third octave with a wavelength spanning at most three blades, or just give each blade a random phase shift. Not sure which would look better.
I hope I'm not confusing you with the fact that there are two sines involved in my instructions. Your first sine wave is to compute phi for each blade. Your second sine wave uses that phi to compute how far along the wind vector the grass is leaning.In the end, you won't be using one sine wave for all the blades (or even for individual blades). You'll be using one per octave, factoring in roughly half the amplitude of the previous octave for successive ones.So right now, I assume you're calculating lean = K * sin(phi), where phi slowly moves from 0 to 2PI in succession. What I want you to do is use lean = K/2 * sin(phi) + K/4 * sin(phi_2) + K/8 * sin(phi_3), where phi_2 is given by some small fraction of (x + y), and phi_3 is given by a much larger fraction of it.At this point I'm not sure if I'm giving you information you already know, or totally confusing you with math you've never done. So I'll just wait.Wow, thanks for the tip! The only problem is that it's not a render, that was running in realtime in Unity(Using custom shaders made in Shader Sandwich, I should make that clearer lol :D). It works by having many planes of grass rendered on top of each other with alpha and fake AO. I did something similar in an older shader though, where I used some perlin noise to offset the grass sways time value. I just used a tesselated plane instead of a 2tri one so that I could get some good movement, I'll upload a new gif in an hour or so with it added in :D.
I was afraid you'd say that.
I didn't notice you had attempted any sort of per-pixel shading on the grass; the GIF you uploaded uses 256 colors or less. That said, I also believe grass is too small a detail for that to overly matter. And truth be told, between still grass with precomputed lighting and moving grass that looks super monotonous, I'd have to choose the former. It'll just look more realistic in the end. In fact, you can probably get away with not dynamically changing the lighting at all.Either way, that's impressive. Perlin noise was going to be my next suggestion, depending on how fast you needed it. Did you compute the noise GPU-side? You don't really need to compute the whole matrix, though I suspect it might be too slow for real-time, either way.The grass as-is looks simple enough to be stored as three vertices. A little generation-time variance in the orientation of the vertices on the ground would be all you need to make it look good at any angle. Worst-case scenario, give the grass three triangles split between four vertices. I saw the Dolphin do this ten years ago, so don't tell me your high-end hardware can't. Give each vertex a number indicating the transform matrix to use, and precompute at least a dozen transforms for the blades to share. See if you can't get that going without a major performance hit.I'm assuming you can keep an array of mat4s GPU-side, pre-compute the projection in these mat4s, and then reference them in the vertex shader alaWow, fuck the modelers I'm actually paying. I should hire you for modeling instead. Man, you have a serious knack for 3D effects. How long have you been using Unity and how is it treating you?
I'm trying to get into Blender but I just don't have the patience for modeling. Animating is kind of fun though. I usually get hung on modeling hair, and then texturing.Nice artwork. Looks like some serious potential here.
*tea heater* Americans drink tea, but nobody here goes out of their way to make contraptions for their tea. Thus I now know that you are from australiaI LOVE TEA SO MUCH.
But I like iced tea so your contraption is useless to me.Good job, on all of your hard work for the past few months though! I'm just joking around.If all you want is something that hits 200C when plugged into a USB port, I can surely hook you up, Cyrus.
Actually, that looks substantially better, if a little robotic. Tone down the vibration when the average lean is smaller; I think that'll close the gap.
To be honest, though, it's kind of grown on me, now. Overall very beautiful.Wow, sorry for taking so long to respond, I've been crazy busy in real life!
I just wanted to point out that my website now has a page for Shader Sandwich - Here!. It's got lots more information on it than I've put here, could be helpful for anyone going into making nice looking games in Unity :)@KilinHaha, thanks :). I've been using Unity since the last spring competition, so around 8/9 months I think. It's been pretty good, much better than the BGE although it also has it's quirks. I think I'll post a blog about Unity soon since I've been using it extensively recently and several bugs have really screwed me over!@Alert Games/AcidSpot on, I am from Australia :D. I guess it's a bit wacky to make something just to keep tea warm, but it's pretty useful, specially when your a scatter brain like me… I'll put the tea down and never pick it back up until I go back to the same room a few hours later.@JoshDreamlandYeah, it's definitely not perfect. I've improved it a bit since although haven't done a gif yet. Here's a picture though, fixed the stupid tree as well :D.This is very impressive! Anyways welcome back! (what a coincidence that one of my latest blog posts says "four months later")