Using Sculptris as outlined previously has proven to be useful for creating environment models as well. Here's a floor flagstone, roughed together in about 10 min. Not great, but I'm getting some ideas.

So I decided to take the time to flesh my little test dude out a bit more. I kinda like him now. I could see myself actually using him in a game. Here is a render from Blender of him; the one in the background is the high-res version sculpted and painted in Sculptris (about 120k triangles) and the …

I'm not really a character artist, or any other kind of artist, for that matter. Sure, back in the day, I used to dabble a bit in painting, pastels, colored pencils, etc... but ask me to draw a picture of your dog now and I'll just stare blankly at you. I've done graphics for all of my video game p…

Wang Tiles!

Sounds kinda dirty, I know, but according to Wikipedia, Wang tiles are sets of tiles that can be used to seamlessly tile a plane, while reducing the visual artifacts of repetition. By constructing a set of Wang tiles, you can piece together arbitrarily large regions of texture using the …

In light of the last post about seamless mappings of noise functions, I've begun yet another re-vamp of the noise library aspect of the Accidental Engine.

The new reorganization formalizes a few conventions that have slowly evolved as I've used the thing over the last couple years. I've imposed a fe…

I've been playing with various types of noise generation for quite awhile, and I use generated noise as an integral part of many of my various workflows: texture creation, level creation, etc... It's great stuff. But there has been something that has bugged me for awhile now, and that is the algori…

Okay, okay, this technique isn't 100% procedural (although, with the use of a software renderer or raytracer it could be). However, it does make heavy use of procedural techniques, so in my opinion it does qualify as "programmer art". As always, we'll be using the good ol' trusty Accidental Noise L…

Jay Barnson talks about a concept he refers to as a "Black Triangle": that stage in a game development cycle when you have accomplished a milestone of sorts that on the surface doesn't look like much, but which, underneath, represents a significant step towards making real progress. The "black tria…

Like a lot of people who "grew up" with C++, I read a lot of books that taught you to program along the lines: "Circle is-a shape, which is-a Renderable which is-a BaseObject", and the whole idea of object-composition never really clicked on me. I've worked on a lot of games. A lot, my friends. Hav…

Been away awhile.

Lately I've (yet again) started to get back into the swing of things. After a few days of munging through old code (old Golem stuff, the Accidental Library, etc...) I decided to take a different tack, and I downloaded the latest Ogre. I remember briefly trying to tinker with it onc…