Dunroving

| TF

I’m trying to fight the temptation to add shading to pen drawings, and trying to concentrate on clear lines and graphic patterns. So, here is a doodle of a home for retired pirates, just off the Scilly Isles in the Atlantic Ocean.

Sliver Brich

| TF

wu_SilverBirch

Here is a silver birch, minding it’s own business. It looks close to dropping its leaves. I made it using Blender and its ‘Sapling’ tree generator, which produces a bunch of curves for the trunk and branches (based on your inputs) and some simple planes for the leaves. I wanted to give the trunk a texture map, so I converted the trunk curves to a mesh, UV unwrapped the mesh and created the birch bark texture in Krita (as it has a nice pencil tool).

Here’s a picture of the mesh if you like that kind of thing:

wu_SilverBirch_Wire

Why am I making trees in Blender? I just have an idea of a little game I’d like to try out and I like the thought of using Blender and Unity3D. I’ll post up progress from time to time.

If I ever

| TF

If I ever make another game it will probably have a whole mess of trees in it. It will probably be made with Blender and Unity3D. My open-source heart would choose Godot as my next game engine, but seeing that Unity3D gives you all sorts of useful stuff like tutorials, cloud build and app store integration for free… It really is a no brainer (for now). Especially if you’re a solo developer with limited resources and time.

I’ve delivered the final Pixelgrams update to the developer, and so after almost 3 years (3 years!? Game development takes time) I can start to think about implementing some of the ideas I’ve been storing in numerous doodles.

This picture is of a very quick and dirty test I did over my lunch hour when I should have been clipped into my stationary bike trainer (I’ll get on it tomorrow). I made a tree with Blender’s Sapling tree generator (that’s a birch), a v simple landscape and imported it into a Unity project. After setting up a bit repository on bitbucket, I managed to build an Android APK with Unity’s rather nifty Cloud Build service. When I have the time and energy, I’ll set the service up to also build iOS versions of the project. That stuff always takes time, and for now Android is a good testing platform.

Onwards, into the trees!

Autumn is Coming (TM)

| TF

And so are a few changes to this on-and-off again blog of my personal work. I plan to write some longer posts to cover those things I’m interested in: work, the tools I use, nature, 3D computer graphics, pixels, homeschooling, game creation, bicycles, stories, life… you know… Stuff. I haven’t written anything of course. Too busy! In the meantime here’s another drawing. Hope you like it.