Steve's Blog

Tower Defense Tutorial Fixing Scene Manager June 19, 2019 Tower Defense Tutorial Project Fixing Problems with the Scene Manager To help get back into the groove of working on my tower defense project, I went over some scripts that I thought might help fix problems and listed out how they reference each other. (Lower placed scripts reference the higher ones) Script Reference List PlayerStats LevelPlayerStats WaveSpawner WaveInformation LevelManager Then I got working on the problems with the scene manager and the method call timings between the different scenes that were giving me errors. There are a lot of issues when references trying to be called before variables are properly set in different scenes, and this offset is leading to a lot of errors where the checks are checking against default values like 0 and null as opposed to their properly set values. So once again, I made a list of problems as I encountered then and possible fixes I

June 10, 2019 Houdini VDB Morph Morph Between 3D Objects Youtube - Houdini Tutorial - 3D Object Morphing using Open VDB Morph and SOP Solver By: Jeshuran Paul One of the finishing touches for my frog generator Houdini project that was suggested was morphing between several of the frog objects it is able to create in a single animation. I was already looking into converting some/all of it into VDB objects at some point to help clean up the joint connections in an interesting and organic way, so this VDB morphing seems like it should fit nicely with that.

June 10, 2019 Houdini - Polywire and Sweep Nodes Using with Ramps Youtube - Houdini Essential:How to control polywire, and sweep node along a curve by ramp parameter. part2 By: Saman khorram I think this tutorial may finally give me my solution to replace my personally made ramped scaling in Houdini for my frog generator with a more consistent and simple SOP setup. I've just needed a way to sweep and then scale separately in the horizontal and vertical direction using a ramp along the line of the sweep. This ended up just being more about altering the pscale along the line. This just alters the uniform scale of the circles. Current Fix I was able to change the vex a bit to give me a more consistent result as of now. I am still using a Sweep of circles over a line and scaling them my own way with a bit of vex, but I've just changed how it works. Initially, I was using this on the circle that I was sweeping: vector a = set(0, 0, 0); @N = normalize(a+@P);

June 8, 2019 Unity 2D Pathfinding Using AStar Youtube - 2D PATHFINDING - Enemy AI in Unity By: Brackeys This tutorial shows how to setup the general AStar package in a 2D Unity project. It goes over the basics of setting up an initial grid and getting a basic enemy AI that will make the enemy follow a target. It also has an example to setup your own simple AStar enemy AI script using AStar's Pathfinding package. This tutorial also cover the basics of setting up an enemy object with a graphics child object, flipping that graphic when the enemy should be going another direction, and just moving an enemy with physics and forces in general, instead of just updating position.

June 6, 2019 Unity Full 2D Game Process Youtube - [Unity 2019 Tutorial] 01 Building the Base for Game - Complex Adventure Game With Unity By: Dev Tutorials This set of tutorials as an in depth guide on the full process of setting up everything for a 2D adventure game in Unity. This gives a nice overview that can help me see what goes in to really bringing everything you create together to make the single, coherent game in Unity.

June 5, 2019 Houdini VDB Tutorials and Basics Youtube - Houdini VDB Test By: Merk Renderland This tutorial just shows a lot of basic ways to use the VDBcombine node to create an interesting bubbling effect all around a polygon surface. It is pretty simple and straight forward, so it is a nice entry into VDBs for Houdini.

June 4, 2019 Houdini Frog Generator Controllers and Foot Webbing Foot Webbing The general concept was to take a line of points and move every other one along its normal to create a general zig-zag pattern. Then, you resample it to make it smoother and wavier. I have another set of points that are along the foot that will create the inner boundary of the webbing. You then use the Add SOP to create a closed polygon between these line boundaries. To make this more consistent, I wanted to create the line using points from the toes. This way, the webbing will follow the toes around properly as I shift them around. This was easy to accomplish by just adding another point at the tip of the toe geo and setting it to have an id attribute of 0. I could then connect all of the same attribute valued points in a line with the Add SOP. The line between all of the toes would then be made up of a number of points equal to the toes. I needed to add a single point between each pair of