Wednesday, April 10, 2013

Meh...Okay, here's some more about the Fantastic Five

Why not?  You guys are small enough rate of visitors to share it with.  ;)

In short:
  • Project Coalescence is a full-featured true remeshing toolkit, designed to allow functions such as
    • merging objects together with seamless topology
    • Grease Pencil guide lines for guided remeshing
    • a polygon grouping feature
    • rapidly remeshing surfaces with even distribution of quads
    • Blender's unique answer to "Dynamesh" (though, a Blender-unique solution that works very differently than ZBrush's Dynamesh but achieves a very similar result)

  • Project Plasma is a full-featured rapid retopology toolkit, designed to allow functions such as
    • auto-retopologizing meshes, with optional Grease Pencil control lines
    • ghosted topology flow suggestions for manual retopology
    • optional auto-bridging of disconnected edge loops
    • organized tools for streamlined manual retopologizing
    • all rapid retopology tools being available during Sculpt Mode (allows for less retopo work when some of it is already done during the sculpting phase)

  • Project Threads is a full-featured clothing creation toolkit, designed to allow functions such as
    • sewing clothes with real-time physics
    • organized tools for applying effects to clothing such as destructive (burns, tears, etc.) and additive (stains, wrinkling, etc.) effects
    • clothes sculpting tools (allows quick creation of clothes on models using Sculpt tools and readies the creation for manipulation with the clothing toolset)
    • a fastener creator, to aid with creating zippers and other fasteners
    • a pocket stitching tool
    • a customizable clothing library of buttons, zippers, cuffs, collars and pre-made base clothing
    • a mannequin creation setup assistant

  • Project Kilauea is a full-featured terrain generation toolkit, designed to allow something functions such as
    • real-time generation of terrain with presets
    • organized tools for painting and export heightmaps
    • automatic heightmap-from-mesh extraction and editing
    • organized tools for ecosystem generation
    • a terrain sculpting toolset
    • terrain texturing with mask support
    • adjustable erosion filters
    • sculpting terrain with weight paint limits
    • hopefully, vector displacement map support to allow erosion on overhanging and concave regions of the terrain

  • Project Fluxus is a full-featured motion graphics toolkit, designed to allow functions such as
    • a rich set of interactive and non-destructive motion effectors
    • ready presets for dynamic particles that react to rigid-body and soft-body dynamics in real-time
    • an animation director that allows you to edit their animations curves while they're running independently from each other--without need of directly touching the keyframes
    • animated "dynamorphing" text effects that automatically remeshes the topology of distorting/morphing text objects with every animated frame as needed (to minimize stretching artifacts)
    • full Cycles support, complete with presets for materials, lighting, node-based special effects and more

Now, again, this development is early, it isn't my primary development, but it is high on my list and I've already started with developing them.  The sooner I can have these tools for myself, the better.  Hopefully, I can get support with full-time development, so that these scripts will see production put in fast-forward.

But again, let me not get ahead of myself.  Now you know some of just what I'm doing during those quiet moments here.

- Brian

Not just developing games...

I just want to break some of the silence of what I'm doing behind-the-scenes in my developer life.  I'm not just developing a couple of games.  I'm also working on improving the tools I use for such game development everyday.

This is an early announcement, but I'm currently working on a set of five addons scripts for Blender.  Here's a rough summary of what I'm calling the Fantastic Five:

  • Project Coalescence, a full-featured true remeshing toolkit.
  • Project Plasma, a full-featured rapid retopology toolkit.
  • Project Threads, a full-featured clothing creation toolkit.
  • Project Kilauea, a full-featured terrain generation toolkit.
  • Project Fluxus, a full-featured motion graphics toolkit.

They are as exciting as they sound.  I'm working on a set of scripts that will utilize all the latest advances of Blender 2.6, integrate them to work together as seamlessly as possible, and push them farther than they've ever been as tools, as well as feature plenty of original innovations.

I'm personally developing the tools I myself have longed need for streamlining game development.  I have heavy games I'm developing and I need heavy tools.  Even though I do own use other tools to complement Blender, having a streamlined one-stop shop for most of my work will prove most invaluable.

When I'm done with it, Blender will be a tool highly-optimized for streamline game development and animation   I'll outline my Fantastic Five in more detail in another post later.  I might even produce a design document to invite other developers to aid my development.

Naturally, as I do have several other projects I'm working on all at once, this will take some time to do.  Right now, SeVer is my top priority.  But if demand proves high enough, I can set it higher as a priority (even though it's already pretty high as a priority).

But I'm getting ahead of myself here.  One step at a time.  Today, an introduction.  These are what I'm working on, in addition to my games.

- Brian