Jason Bakker's Blog - A GDD Template for the Indie Developer The following blog post, unless otherwise noted, was written by a member of Gamasutra’s community. The thoughts and opinions expressed are those of the writer and not Gamasutra or its parent company. I'm in the process of making a few different design documents at the moment, so that our iPhone development team can have some options to choose from. After writing a couple of docs, I've massaged my design document "template" into something that really works for me, and I think works better than the traditional formats for independent game development. The documentation style you get taught in university and at game companies tends to have a large focus on target audiences, marketability and "selling the project" to whoever is reading it, as opposed to describing the project and laying it out in a more objective and easy to read manner. Intro 1 paragraph description of the game. The dame's gone missing, and, just like always, you're to blame. Character Bios Rough Plot 4-6 paragraphs. That's it!
Pixar’s Story Rules, Illustrated in Lego by ICanLegoThat Last year, Pixar story artist Emma Coats (@lawnrocket) tweeted 22 rules of storytelling like “give your characters opinions” and “no work is ever wasted.” Alex Eylar, aka ICanLegoThat, has illustrated twelve of those rules with Legos. He gave us the chance to premiere them at Slacktory. Science of Fluid Sims: Pt 2 – RealFlow Last September we published a piece on fluid sims. The aim was to examine the topic via one primary approach. Here is a second companion piece to that original story that examines the topic via the work of Fusion CI Studios. Mark Stasiuk and Lauren Millar are co-founders of Fusion CI Studios, a dynamic effects specialist facility that uses RealFlow extensively. Stasiuk started using RealFlow and answering questions on the forums with such insight that RealFlow’s authors at Next Limit began noticing. - Above: watch Fusion CI’s demo reel. Stasiuk has a doctorate from Bristol University in fluid dynamics of volcanic eruptions. “We called him Dr. “Anyway,” continues Stasiuk, “I was fooling around hobby-wise and teaching myself CG stuff even at that time to use software like RealFlow as a research tool, and as a visualization tool, to try and communicate what a volcanic eruption could do to your village. RealFlow - Above: watch a RealFlow demo reel. Polygonization Smorganic
Path Tracing vs Ray Tracing – Dusterwald.com Path tracing is all the rage in the offline rendering space these days. From Cycles to SuperFly (based on the open source Cycles) to Octane, most new rendering engines seem to be using this technology. Sometimes referred to as “unbiased, physically correct rendering” what is path tracing, how is it different to ray tracing and is it the future of high quality offline rendering? I will be looking to answer all of those questions in this blog post for anyone confused by the changing landscape of rendering engines (note that I will be talking about offline rendering in this post, as opposed to realtime rendering). So first up the question: what is path tracing? Unfortunately the name fails to be terribly descriptive and when I first heard about it I thought it was simply a different name for ray tracing. Now a path tracer is like a ray tracer on steroids. So is path tracing the future of high quality rendering?
Michael Dunnam - 3d Environment Artist - Free Stuff XMD Brushes inShare66 New Update! Here is the second release of the XMD Dragon Brushes! Update! I just added a Dragon Brush Set! Update! For now I will be using gumroad to host my XMD brushes, along with tutorials and textures! Forums for Feedback! Polycount Zbrush Central CGSociety Game Artisans Creative Crash The Gnomon Workshop CGHub 3DTotal 3D Coat Brushes Click Here To Download! Thank you Phil Nolan for your generosity! 3d Coat Thread for troubleshooting! The State of Rendering – Part 2 In Part 1 of The State of Rendering, we looked at the latest trends in the visual effects industry including the move to physically plausible shading and lighting. Part 2 explores the major players in the current VFX and animation rendering markets and also looks at the future of rendering tech. There is more about rendering at www.fxphd.com this term. There are many renderers, of course, but we have focused below on the primary renderers that have come up during the last 18 months of writing fxguide stories. The order is not in terms of market share – in reality the 3ds Max default renderer or Mental Ray would swamp many others due to the market share of Autodesk with Max, Maya and XSI. 2. 2.1 RenderMan – Pixar fxguide will soon be publishing a piece on the 25th anniversary of RenderMan. Image courtesy of Dylan Sisson, Pixar. In those interviews and podcasts you can hear first hand about the evolution of the product and spec, but you will also hear about the leadership of Dana Batali.
The Science of Fluid Sims Fluid sims have become such a vital part of so many visual effects films, yet are not well understood by most general artists. We try and explain the science behind the fluid sims, and look at one in particular closely: Naiad, with help from our friends at Exotic Matter. Introduction One of the most significant and commonly requested areas of real world simulation is fluid simulation. Fluid sims are not confined to just fluids either, they can be used to achieve fire and flames - the fluid being simulated in this scenario is the air itself (a gas). Fluid simulations (fluid sims) have many applications outside visual effects. History Before the computer graphics industry got involved, fluids simulation was being actively modeled mathematically as early as the 1950's and 60's. Unfortunately, most methods for real world CFD are needlessly complex for visual effects fluid sims and scale poorly. - Watch Jerry Tessendorf talk at TED. - A Naiad scene test: 'Bunny in Trouble' Basic concepts
Path Tracing The random sampling in path tracing causes noise to appear in the rendered image. The noise is removed by letting the algorithm generate more samples, i.e. color values resulting from a single ray. A more in-depth explanation of the path tracing algorithm is given below. Random Sampling In path tracing rays are distributed randomly within each pixel in camera space and at each intersection with an object in the scene a new reflection ray, pointing in a random direction, is generated. The samples in a path-traced image are distributed evenly over all pixels. The random components in path tracing cause the rendered image to appear noisy. Samples Per Pixel (SPP) The defining factor for render quality is the number of samples per pixel (SPP). The higher SPP you have in a rendered image the less noise will be noticeable. Sunlight does not require high SSP to give a nice image. Render Time There is no definite answer to how long it will take to render a scene. More About Noise SPP Comparisons
Beveling - TWC Wiki From TWC Wiki You can find an up to date version of this tutorial at There is information floating around, especially of recent, about never having hard edges (except in certain cases), and instead, bevel everything. The information here is not from my own investigations, but merely what I've heard, checked, and had confirmed. [edit] How Real-Time Rendering Works In order to understand beveling, you have to understand a bit of the 3D pipeline. However, we run into two interesting scenarios; the same vertex may have two (or more) UV coordinates (such as if it lays on a seam), or two (or more) normals (if it has hard normals, separate smoothing groups, etc), even though it is, in your modeling program, the same vertex. With this in mind, let's go back to what I said about vertices as all that matters. [edit] Should I Bevel Everything? Well, no. A vertex is broken or split when it has a hard normal, or new UV coordinate. [edit] What has how much? So, to recap: