I've been playing around with the pieces I made for the Modular Park renders back in 2016, adding some stuff, editing some others, and trying to just build up a collection of parts to make more pleasant places with. I made this test render today just to see how things are shaping up.
Still some work to do, but I do enjoy making cozy little outdoor spaces with these parts. 🙂
I've got that tingly feeling again... my fingers want to do something creative! But they're currently in the middle of cranking out some comps for a prospective client in Blender.
That's sort of creative. But it's also a lot of technical problem-solving that isn't as fun.
Soon, hopefully!
I'm pretty good at creating shaders in Blender, and I've made a few decent things in Unreal Engine as well. In GameMaker, shaders remain elusive. Why?
Well, Blender and Unreal both have intuitive methods for creating shaders. Blender has a node-based system where you connect different pieces of the shader program together and, based on how you do it, different effects are achieved. Unreal is similar, with a system called Blueprint.
GameMaker Studio 2, on the other hand, has none of this. If you want to create shaders in GameMaker, you have to either code them by hand, or find one that someone else has coded, and tailor it to fit your project. This can become especially difficult if you're not very familiar with GLSL, or you're trying to work from an example that was made with a different platform in mind.
I appreciate that it makes me think a bit more about what I'm doing on those other systems, and how to accomplish the things I take for granted elsewhere. I'm not very good at it yet, though!
Today, I released the first update to gamemaker-3d-io, a Blender addon I created to help get 3D models from Blender into GameMaker Studio 2.
This update brings some new functionality to the addon: in addition to triangle lists, it can now also export line lists and point lists. Some neat effects can now be achieved!
I also refactored the addon a bit, splitting out the data prep and output-building functions into their own modules. And I cleaned up the export menu to be more organized in a better way.
Get the addon at the link above, or at Github. If you happen to use this addon for your game, be sure to leave me a note and let me know what you think!
It's been out for a few days, but in case you haven't seen it, I've finally updated my addon for Blender, which allows you to output 3D models to GameMaker Studio 2. The latest iteration of the addon will output models to GameMaker's vertex buffer format, so you can load the files natively, without including a bunch of scripts in the game.
You can read more about the addon here: https://martincrownover.com/blender-addon-gm-vertex-buffers/
Or you can go straight to the Github page, here: https://github.com/massivecatapult/gamemaker-3d-io
I've been playing around with Flip Fluids, an addon for Blender that does liquid simulations that (seem to) go beyond what Blender's built-in liquid simulation can do. I've not made anything particularly mind-blowing yet, but I thought I'd post a render I made today just for fun. Behold: some orange-ish goop flooding down a staircase!
This cat character was meant to be used for an animation I was thinking about working on, but never got around to finishing. It's almost fully rigged - it only needs more face controls - and the materials I used to shade it were meant to make it look like a posed claymation figure.
It's meant to look a little retro, and a little goofy. The idea was that it would undergo the typical slapstick antics a cartoon from the older days of animation might (think mallets, anvils, etc.). And he'd have kind of a bad attitude about it, so you wouldn't mind watching him get clobbered.
Maybe someday I'll pick it up and start working on it again!
I was playing around with some Blender stuff for work, and experimenting with creating rocks/asteroids. This isn't a design we ultimately went with, but it was a good subject for some lighting and texture practice in Cycles.
As a practice exercise for modeling/creating materials in Blender, I decided to work on a model inspired by the famous pipe-infesting Piranha Plant enemy from Super Mario Bros.
The model was created as a very simple low-resolution mesh with a SubSurf modifier to add detail, and all the textures were created using Blender's internal texture nodes, in Cycles.
After finishing the last render in this series, I posted it to Facebook and a friend of mine who has a lot of experience working in the VFX industry gave me some great critique. So I took this the project back to the drawing board and using his notes, re-worked almost every part of the scene. The result is a much better render!
You can read a bit about the process of building this render here.