Tag Archives: Websites

This post presents CG-related websites.

FlowMap Painter

Flowmaps allow you to direct movement patterns in animated shaders. This is a great way to make real-time fluids look believable.

Unfortunately creating them can be a bit of a pain:

http://www.valvesoftware.com/publications/2010/siggraph2010_vlachos_waterflow.pdf

Fortunately a few people created some tools that allow you to paint flow-maps in an easy way:

Teck Lee Tan’s stand-alone FlowMap Painter is fairly poor in features, but you immediately see the result of your work.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=sJBn8ykpMwQ

http://teckartist.com/?page_id=107

—–

Mattias Van Camp’s 3DS Max script seems to be fairly rich in features and seems to be the better choice (if you have 3DS Max at your disposal).

http://www.scriptspot.com/3ds-max/scripts/flow-map-painter

http://www.polycount.com/forum/showthread.php?t=97215

 

Please write about other uses for flowmaps and tools that can be used to edit flowmaps in the comments. I’ll try to expand this article and keep it up-to-date.

Did you make an awesome Houdini tool or some script or stand-alone tool you want to share? I’ll gladly link to your work.

A summary of things you probably already heard about.

green

 

http://io9.com/5987131/why-the-visual-effects-industry-protested-the-oscars-and-how-the-academy-insulted-them-in-return?fb_action_ids=280404688756707&fb_action_types=og.likes&fb_source=other_multiline&action_object_map=%7B%22280404688756707%22%3A479696988758398%7D&action_type_map=%7B%22280404688756707%22%3A%22og.likes%22%7D&action_ref_map=%5B%5D

I would not point blame at any one particular studio or person, but I think the subject is worth talking and thinking about. If studios that greatly contribute to successful products go bankrupt, something is not right.

Trailers

I stumbled over www.behance.net and saw, among other things, this neat “trailer”:

Freestyle2 “The movie”
http://vimeo.com/29817827
I really like the overall style and feeling of this movie. It’s too bad that the actual game looks nothing like it. Which brings me to this unfortunate topic: http://www.escapistmagazine.com/videos/view/jimquisition/6863-Previewed-Preordered-Prescrewed
I understand that games are commercial products and huge investments. Nice trailers in combination with a pre-order strategy sell games. http://www.penny-arcade.com/patv/episode/demo-daze And as developer, I want to sell games.

But that was never the problem. The big issue is that modern trailers create expectations that significantly surpass the product. I think consumers are not so starved for new games that they will allow a (normal) studio to (repeatedly) disappoint them. http://www.pcgamer.com/2013/01/31/no-more-medal-of-honor-ea-pulls-from-rotation-due-to-poor-reception/

The capacity of the internet to detect bulls**t is incredibly high. In other words, if you are a developer and you are lying to your consumers, you are shooting yourself in the foot. I believe it would be beneficial for developers and consumers alike, to be more honest.
The consumer-side is pretty much: “I want beautiful, innovative, captivating games and I don’t want to pay too much.”
The developer-side is pretty much: “We want to make those game, but we have limited resources and we are just human. We also want to make money.”
I believe we can find a healthy middle-ground.

– I am writing this while watching the presentation for PlayStation 4 and listening to the developers talk about their projects. I am reasonably hopeful.

Random CG-links part2

http://www.cgsociety.org/index.php/CGSFeatures/CGSFeatureSpecial/the_top_ten_tips_of_texturing Oldy but goody, tips for texturing. CGsociety provides tutorials and news. Check out their forum, if you haven’t already.

http://www.the-blueprints.com/blueprints/ Blueprints for just about everything. Beware the quality is not always ideal.

http://www.makehuman.org/ A tool for the procedural creation of 3D humans. It’s not perfect, but it could be useful in a variety of ways.

http://www.pixologic.com/sculptris/features/ Here you can get Sculptris legally for free. Sculptris is a digital sculpting-tool, not too different from Zbrush. It works with tris and can dynamically add and remove detail by subdividing the mesh where you paint. This leads to a workflow which is somewhat different from ZBrush. It comes with GoZ (automatic transfer to Zbrush).
Pixologic also makes Zbrush and they provide free Zbrush tutorials and have great stuff on their forum, but you probably know that already.

http://area.autodesk.com/ Texturs, plug-ins, scripts, shaders and more.

I am just going to provide content until somebody cares.^^

Random CG-links part1

http://www.3dmodelfree.com/ 3D models for 3ds Max. Very high resolution furniture and environments.

http://unity3d.com/gallery/demos/demo-projects Free games based on the Unity-engine. There you can also find the free Unity engine (now in version 4!) and its asset-store.

http://www.bildburg.de/texturen/index.html Free textures and pictures that could be useful for some quick & dirty prototyping.

http://www.3dtotal.com/ Tutorials, textures, pictures and more. Great stuff.

http://mayang.com/textures/index.htm Some great pictures that can be made into textures or inspire modelling.

Have I given you some new links? Should there be a Random CG-links part2? Leave a comment!