Blender Cycles

Awhile ago, the Blender team started work on a new renderer for Blender, called Cycles, driven by the work being done on the next open movie project. The latest releases of Blender include this renderer, and if you haven't looked into it yet you're kind of missing out. Cycles is neat.…

What is that monstrosity, you ask? Why, I'm delighted you asked. That is a first stab at a material node tree for doing triplanar mapping in Blender's Cycles renderer. Until Cycles came along, I couldn't find any way at all of doing tri-planar mapping. The result:



Woot! No stretching. One of the big…

As I indicated in my last post, I've been playing with creating renderings of forests in Blender. In order that I not forget this process when I inevitably move on to something else, I'm going to write out what I'm doing here. It's actually pretty simple, but it's been a few hours of fiddling and w…

I've been on an art push lately. Today, I was fiddling around with the idea of using Blender's particle functionality to create large forests. It actually worked pretty well. The idea is that you create a terrain and attach a particle system to it. You can paint the terrain with vertex weights to c…

I am still alive. In case, you know... you care.

It's the busy season, though. Temps are high, weather is bone dry, perfect for getting projects done, so work is slammingly busy. And when I come home, there's a smelly kid to take off my frazzled wife's hands. So I haven't been able to do much. Gobli…

Now that I've uninstalled the game and have had a few days without playing to mull things over, I've been able to put my finger on a few of the reasons I was unimpressed and even upset with Diablo 3. I find that almost all of those reasons can be neatly summed up in a single idea: that the design o…

Today was a busier day at work, so I didn't get to do a whole lot. But I did excise the old chain-of-green-arrows path preview code in lieu of a preview mode that shows hexes you can walk to given your current number of movement points, as seen above. It's a quick hack, though, that doesn't cache t…

Obligatory nightly screenshot:


Today I implemented inventory views in the combat control panel interface. An inventory view acts as an observer, tracking an inventory full of items and presenting a grid layout of icon buttons. In the above shot, you can see the 3 button (currently) main menu with th…

Pictured above: Travel mode using the ashlands graphic set. I am not in love with the mountains; I think tonight or tomorrow I'll tweak the noise modules that generate them a bit to add more "life" and texture to them. The trees turned out pretty okay.



I experimented with a different UI scheme today…

Did some more work on codifying the actions and skills system. I took out the old melee code, and implemented a more general structure for executing an action. All actions are now described by a table of data, and a combatant can be commanded to execute an action. For example, a melee attack curren…