Stuff & Nonsense
Project work and a jet-set lifestyle* is keeping me away from personal projects. But I grabbed an hour to mock something up: A little papercraft tower, tree and interested onlooker. The next steps will be to knock something up in Google’s ARCore and see if any of it works. You can’t get much more lo-poly than this.
Below is the drawing for the tower and the tree’s textures:
That is all for now.
(* = I’m animation directing on a co-pro project, I get to go on an aeroplane occasionally)
Although I pay a monthly subscription to Adobe CC and so can access tools like Premiere, if I’m putting together videos I’ll usually choose to use Blender’s built in VSE (Video Sequence Editor). That’s because once you get to know Blender, you grow to love it and it’s overall approach to creating stuff. The VSE is a fairly bare bones video editor and does have some limitations. Its text tool is particularly lacking and I sometimes struggle to get it to play back the video footage in the view port at 30 frames per second. However, if you simply want to cut sequences, add sound and music, apply overlays and such like then it’s a great tool. You can change the appearance of clips with effects layers, animate properties such as opacity / position / rotation and volume in the usual way with keyframes. Render settings are handled in the usual Blender render properties windows.
Of course, if you work on an Apple Mac you can use the free iMovie programme to edit content and I guess that there’s something similar for Windows 10 users. However, if you want to use something that works well, isn’t limited to a particular brand of operating system, is open source AND allows you to make low poly birds wearing hats, then give Blender and its VSE a whirl.
If you’ve got this far and like the look of my videos, then head over and subscribe to my Froststuff YouTube Channel.
🙂
But someone has to do it…
This is a work in progress, and mainly an exercise in getting textures and meshes at the right size for a small side project. Next step is to look into bump mapping the duck, and rigging for animation, of course. This version of the duck is relatively low poly. Below is a render with a sub surface modifier applied to the little fellow. The background textures are hand-drawn and coloured, scanned into Photoshop. They’re imported into Blender as planes. The duck is the usual combination of cubes, spheres and cylinders.
Drawing stuff with pen and pencil, before scanning into the computer and then into Blender. Faster than drawing in Photoshop (at least it is for me). Loads of room for mistakes, but that’s half the fun (the other half is doing all the hatching).
Blooming typical. Continued working on the VR thing, and then paid work has come in to take over. Ah well. I’ll get there eventually. It’s all about pushing personal projects on just enough when one has the time.
2018 will be the Year of the Toucan, and Timmy 2 Cans will be the Mayor of Your Town.
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!
