Steve's Blog

April 28, 2019 Engineering Statics and Linkages Recap Engineer4free - Statics Wikipedia - Linkage (mechanical) I am brushing up on my old statics topics to help work on a project. I am just gathering up some of them here to go over in the near future. The main focus for now will be general statics and possibly linkages.

April 28, 2019 Making Pokemon in Unity Tutorials Youtube - Lets Make... Pokemon in Unity! - Episode 1 - Basic Setup World/Character By: BrainStorm Games Youtube - Unity Lets Clone a Game [ Pokemon ] - Part 1 By: JesseEtzler Going off of my recent trend, I've just been looking to grab tutorials to make games I loved (or still love) playing as a way to learn more about coding different systems in Unity with C#. I believe the Pokemon games will help get me into some scripts that are very repeatable on a large scale (such as a script that creates a pokemon and its stats), which is something I haven't gotten into a lot. Being an RPG game with random encounters, it may also help me work in a system that very consistently moves between two major scene types with the overworld scenes and the battle scenes. These scenes will also give the player very significantly different actions while still carrying information between the two types of scenes.

April 27, 2019 Mimicing Ori in Unity Bash Action Youtube - Ori and the Blind Forest - Game Design Reel By: James Benson Youtube - Making Ori Y Bash [Unity C#] (Ori and the Blind Forest) #1 By: Wabble - Unity Tutorials As a big Ori and the Blind Forest fan, I just wanted to see if I could find some tutorials to put together some of the movement or actions given to the player in Ori. The first video is a cool sample of a lot of the different game mechanics seen in Ori, as both their simple concept version as well as their in game version. This is actually extra helpful as the concept version really simplifies it down to what is really happening and makes it easier to process and disect to replicate.

April 25, 2019 GPU Instancing Tutorials for Unity Youtube - GPU Instancing Tutorial (No, Seriously, This Is Easy) By: Craig Perko Youtube - [Unity] GPU Instancing Tutorial By: Blendcraft Creations Youtube - Unity3D - 2 Minute Tips - Use GPU Instancing to reduce drawcalls when batching won't By: Unity3d College Youtube - GPU Instancer - Features Showcase By: GurBu Technologies I am starting a project in class that is potentially looking to instantiate a lot of flower objects in Unity, so I wanted to take a look at GPU instancing and see if this was a practical solution for us if we ended up going down this route. If not, this is still a good opportunity for me to get a taste of working on purposefully passing certain information to the GPU and using it for specific tasks. The first three videos are direct tutorials showing how to set this up or how to use it, while the last one is an already made asset in the Unity Asset Store showcasing a very strong GPU ...

April 25, 2019 Scene Management Solutions Identifying Issues and Possible Solutions Scene Conflict There are two scenes that load at the same time that have scripts within them that want to reference scripts within the other or both reference the Logic scene which needs to be updated simultaneously Even though they should ideally be loading at the same time, one is always loading ‘just before the other’ This causes the first scene loading to miss its references since the other scene does not exist to it yet when it goes to get those references The second scene loading in does however load its references properly I’ve tested switching the order of loading and the second scene functions properly consistently, while the first scene has errors Current Issues Level scene loading second to make sure the nodes can get the BuildManager reference However, the Level scene sets the number of lives the player has (LevelPlayerStats passes lives in to the PlayerStats script in th...

April 23, 2019 Houdini Vex Code cgWiki - HoudiniVex As I was working on a chandelier project in Houdini, I needed a lot of help learning the ropes of Vex. In my research I came across this huge resource that was not quite useful at the time, but looked like a really good place to start for some vex tutorials. I want to come back later to this resource to help get a hang of the basics of vex in Houdini.

April 22, 2019 Intro to Python Programming Tutorial - 04 Youtube - Learn Python 3 for Machine Learning & Web Development [2019] By: Programming with Mosh Progress End Time: 1:41:55 Next Part of Tutorial: For Loops NOTES Weight Converter This was a simple exercise to try and create a simple weight converter. It would take a user input weight and ask if it was in Kilograms or Pounds (lbs), then convert it to the other unit. Their solution to this exercise provided a nice way to make strings less case sensitive. Since the unit input was just the first letter of the unit abbreviation (L for pounds and K for kilograms), this could make it completely non-case sensitive. You simply use the upper() method on the string you are comparing a value for before checking what it is. Then you only have to compare it to the capital case instance and either they will have already typed in the capital instance, or you will have converted the lower case to an upper case...

April 18, 2019 Human Fall Flat Steam Workshop Original Human Fall Flat Workhop Steam Group Page Steam - Human Fall Flat Workshop Setting Up Human Fall Flat Workshop in Unity Steam - Human Workshop: Getting Started - Configuring Unity, Making your First Level, Publishing and Subscribing to Levels This documentation gets you through the process of initially setting up Human Fall Flat Workshop to work in Unity. It starts with the proper version of Unity, which is 2017.4.13f1. You create a new 3D project and import the workshop Unity package that is part of the Human Fall Flat game files you get from Steam. Then, close out of Unity and copy over the "Project Settings" folder from the HFF game files into your Unity project, overwriting the existing "Projece Settings". That's the gist of getting it all setup in Unity. The rest of the documentation gets into setting up your first level and getting a basic understanding of the core objects such as t...

April 17, 2019 Exporting From Houdini FBX and Color Information Exporting the Model Using my balloon Houdini example from class, I was able to export the geometry using the Educational version (the Apprentice version does not allow exporting FBX, but you could export an OBJ for my purposes possibly). This was very straight forward, as you can just use File -> Export -> FBX in Houdini. Since I was doing this for a class to use in a Snapchat filter (using LensStudio), I wanted to reduce the poly count a lot. I opened the FBX in Maya and used a basic Reduce to reduce the poly count a lot before exporting that for use in LensStudio. While this was good enough to export the geometry, I could not get any of the color information to come with it. I originally exported out an OBJ and had the same issue, so I exported FBX in hopes it would keep the color information somehow, but this was not the case. Exporting the Color Information My first thought to get the color ...

April 15, 2019 Setting Up Java Dev Kit, Eclipse, and Working in Command Prompt Oracle - Java SE Development Kit 8 Downloads Eclipse Site Basic Setup As I'm preparing for a foundational programming course, I needed to get Java setup on my computer. This started with downloading the Java Development Kit (JDK) and Eclipse (an IDE package for working with Java). I had to make sure to run and install the JDK first, as Eclipse needed some of its components to setup initially. I needed to do some work using the command prompt on Windows, and found I was having trouble using the javac and java commands. This turned out to be an environment variable issue (something I ran into similarly when starting Python). I was able to easily resolve this by checking the "Edit the System Environment Variables" section of my control panel and adding the path to the Java jdk bin file to my "Path" system variable.

April 13, 2019 Houdini Flowers Tutorials Youtbe - CGI Rose using Houdini and Redshift by Stephen Bester | VFX By: CG Record Youtube - Houdini Tutorial: Creating Water flowers blossoming | Project File for download By: CG Record Vimeo - Water flowers blossoming in Houdini. Tutorial + project (HIP,comp,ae) By: Mike Stoliarov UPDATE 4/29: This is the same video as the one above, but has higher resolution options so you can see the steps much clearer. These are a couple tutorials showing how to create flower-like objects in Houdini. I'd like to get into making plants with Houdini at some point, especially flowering plants, so I just wanted to start gathering some resources for that. While one of these tutorials is for creating water flowers, a lot can be taken from that for the core of the flower making process. The other tutorial is for making a rose, which is perfect for a lot of flower uses. It also says it uses Redshift, which I'm not sure what that is or ...

April 12, 2019 Human Fall Flat Steam Workshop Steam - Human Fall Flat Workshop

April 11, 2019 2019 GDC Vault Talks GDC 2019 - Into the Breach' Design Postmortem By: Matthew Davis From: Subset Games GDC 2019 - 'Dead Cells': What the F*n!? By: Sebastien Benard From: Motion Twin Into the Breach Design Postmortem Constraint Focused Design: This basically has them set constraints as early in the game design process as possible that help direct and restrict future design choices. This can be something like a genre, or a game mechanic like health. Gameplay focused design: They approach making games by starting the the main gameplay they want to create, and then building everything else to fit around that. Everything such as narrative or theme ends up following the gameplay. They used a very board game inspired design for "Into the Breach". They like to keep numbers small, easy to understand, and meaningful. The difference from 1 to 2 should be impactful. This also leads into how they designed enemies. There is a "che...

April 9, 2019 2019 GDC Vault Talks GDC 2019 - Into the Breach' Design Postmortem By: Matthew Davis From: Subset Games GDC 2019 - Cursed Problems in Game Design By: Alex Jaffe From: Riot Games GDC 2019 - How to Teach 5 Semesters of Game Design in 1 Class By: Jason Wiser From: Yaya Play Games, Tufts and Harvard University GDC 2019 - Creating Customized Game Events with Machine Learning (Presented by Amazon) By: Africa Perianez From: Yokozuna Data The 2019 GDC vault has finally opened! I just wanted to take a quick peak and see if I could find any interesting talks to watch in the near future. I really loved playing Into the Breach, so I'm excited to check out their Postmortem. Riot Games always has interesting talks with League of Legends size and popularity. The other two just seemed like interesting sounding titles that I'd like to hear more about.

April 8, 2019 Houdini Assignment Fuse and Group I worked on a Houdini class assignment to make a basic model and decided to try and create the bulb on the back of a Bulbasaur, a Pokemon that is half plant and half dinosaur. I figured I could use a lot of the basics we learned in class to get me pretty far, while also needing to cover a few new things to get it exactly how I wanted it. In class, we created a basic hot air balloon. This consisted of tracing a curve over a background reference image of a hot air balloon, creating a section of the balloon from this original curve, then replicating that section as many times as needed to fully encompass the full balloon. These were a lot of principles I used for creating my bulb. The biggest hurdle I needed to overcome was that that top of each of my sections would all need to connect at a single point, so I would need some additional nodes after simply creating a "left" and "right" variation of my addit...

April 7, 2019 Intro to Python Programming Tutorial - 03 Youtube - Learn Python 3 for Machine Learning & Web Development [2019] By: Programming with Mosh Progress End Time: 1:16:25 Next Part of Tutorial: Project: Weight Converter NOTES Arithmetic Operations In Python we have the same operations used in math, as well as a few extra ones. There is addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division. Here are a few of the extra operators. By using //, it returns the integer of the division with no remainder. Using the modulus, %, it returns the remainder after performing the division. Finally, ** is exponent, so this will raise a number to the other values power. Then there is the augmented assignment operator. This is done by placing the operator directly before the equal sign. For example: x += 3 is the same as: x = x + 3 Operator Precedence This is the math concept where certain operations are performed before other operations. Many of these in Pyth...

April 5, 2019 Notion Note Taking App Youtube - Your First Day with Notion | A Beginner's Guide By: Keep Productive Notion was a note taking app recommended to me by a friend and I wanted to give it a try. I've just started getting into the basics of it but it gives you a lot of freedom and a lot of options so I wanted to look into a beginner user tutorial like this one to help get myself oriented. This seems like a really useful app that I believe will help me organize my activities in the future.

April 4, 2019 Lens Studio Making Snapchat AR Filters Lens Studio - Snapchat This site allows a user to download the software necessary to create your own Snapchat filters. This was a thing introduced to me in a VR/AR class as another simple way to explore the uses of the technology and get a hand on working with it. I've already had experience working with VR and AR in Unity, so this will be another nice way to just discover some ways to work with that type of technology.

April 3, 2019 Using Houdini with Unity Houdini Unity Plug In Youtube - Houdini Engine | Create an Asset for Unity Youtube - Houdini Engine for Unity Youtube - Procedural Workflows with Houdini and Unity 2018 for Game Artists | Kenny Lammers | SIGGRAPH 2018 By: Houdini After starting a Houdini procedural modeling course today, I wanted to start looking into ways to easily implement the assets into Unity. These videos help with that basic process, as well as showed me that there are basic plugins to integrate Houdini assets into Unity with some of their procedural properties in tact still. The last video is also a very technical implementation of using Houdini within Unity to help with track design for a driving-type game. It begins to really show the power of using Houdini to develop live game assets.