3D computer graphics

Some links and snippets from the last Local Game Designers Meeting:

Feel like a real game designer with the iPhone game GameDev Story!

My neighbour Benjamin Burger is a master's student at the Zurich University of Arts and plans a project on bringing games onto the stage – I'll follow that closely – obviously, since it is the exact combination of my current and previous field of study.

Creating normal maps in blender (I think we have another post around here about exactly that topic): It is necessary to use two meshes: one is low-, the other the high-poly version. The low-poly version can easily be created using the decimate modifier. Having both meshes selected, one can bake the normal map from them, already preparing a image in the Image/UV window that will take the baked map. This map, obviously, can then be applied to the low-poly version.

Also: CrazyBump is now available for Mac OS X!

If you want to discuss game development in general, you might want to check out http://Gamedev.stackexchange.com – a recently opened Stack Exchange on game development.

[This might only make sense to me – these are very short notes on the presentation Janina held on using cloth simulation in 3ds Max].

The Plane that is supposed to be the cloth needs to get a Cloth modifier. In the modifier properties both the actual cloth as well as the objects the cloth is falling unto have to be added - the later one as a collider. Also, gravity is (unlike blender) not a standard part of the scene and has to be added as a force field. These forces need to be added to the simulation as well.

Before the simulation works, it has to be calculated - the interface should provide a button for that as well.

By creating vertice groups, these groups can be attached to other meshes in order to fix a cloth to a solid object.

Unity has a similar function that works with the Cloth component. In order to attach it to something, "Attached Colliders" can be defined.

Animation curves in the new Unity 3 can not only be used for animation, but can be directly accessed by scripts.

By defining

AnimationCurve curve;

you can add a specific curve to the script in the editor. Using AnimationCurve.Evaluate() you can get the y value at a specific time. Using those curves, you are no longer limited to use Lerp() at every corner (or one of the additional functions provided by Mathfx).

Thanks to Mario von Rickenbach who mentioned that in a lesson as an aside …

Exporting an animated armature with a mesh for Unity using Blender 2.5 can be a bit of a hassle. With the armature parented to the mesh, I could either export the mesh or the armature with the animations, but never both.

Having the armature separate from the mesh seemed to have worked – I have now everything set up in Unity, both mesh and armature with animation.

Though the animation looks slighty wobbly …

This might work for simple animations; more complicated set-ups might still fail to export, since Blender 2.5 and Unity3D 3.0 both have not exactly extensively tested.