IBY'S DEV DIARY

I still wasn't too fond of the 3D Cursor so I went to  BlenderArtists.org . I was able to create this Addon in collaboration with a Python user, Iceythe, in the past 3 weeks in my free time. The addon reveals the 3D Cursor when you press the shortcut and then automatically hides the 3D Cursor when you use a different tool.  It was a good opportunity to do some python scripting since it's an important skill for a technical artist to have. However, Iceythe was able to enhance the script even further by adding a mini UI within the Addon in V2.0 (hopefully the last version) to change the keyboard shortcut easily. The old version V1.8 required manually calling one of the operator/functions in the keymap and changing the shortcut manually in the script for the other operator which is a bit unintuitive. Anyway, I have managed to put this onto Github along with a wiki/instructions as someone on the Blender.community forums suggested:  https://github.com/IbyA/3D-Cursor-Auto-Visibil

The Fluid Simulation I made earlier using render targets broke as I made a lot of changes to the water system since I first made the render target. However, before I attempt to fix this I thought it might be a good idea to try and integrate another type of fluid simulation I saw on Twitter by Campo Santo's Matt Wilde. New on the blog: Matt Wilde ( @skilful ) dives deep into a scene cut from the announcement trailer. https://t.co/nPW71WjhC0 pic.twitter.com/Hlc8OZHrLf — Campo Santo (@camposanto) March 16, 2018 I was a little confused by what Signed Distance Field is and if it was related to the normal distance field I see in UE4. However, James Burton (White Paper Games) informed me that signed distance field are usually used in Ray Marching. He advised me to watch some Youtube videos on the subject.. He also mentioned that this was getting into Graphics programming territory. As much as I'd like to learn how this is made, I might have to leave this alone and atte

I managed to integrate distance field flow maps into the waterfall using the basic concept from this Unreal Engine Forum Post:  https://forums.unrealengine.com/development-discussion/rendering/47456-distance-field-flow-map I then combined this with the techniques I learned from the free assets on the Unreal Engine Marketplace called River Water Tool with Flow Buoyancy by James Stone:  https://www.unrealengine.com/marketplace/en-US/slug/river-water-tool-with-flow-buoyancy I was also studying up Ryan Bruck's GDC presentation on distance fields and compared with his approach:  https://www.gdcvault.com/play/1026262/Technical-Artist-Bootcamp-Distance-Fields One thing that piqued my interest in Ryan's work is how he included a regular normal map of the small stones which controls the flow of the water. The stones are just part of the landscape material using height data. It's a pretty nifty trick. Changing the flow of water through the use of the regular normal map in Fo

I've been doing some research and looking into how I'm going to create the environment. I needed to establish a workflow for stylized projects so I've been working on creating the first model: First meshes tend to take a while to make because I'm trying to get to grips with establishing the art style, the modeling, texturing and rendering techniques and the workflow process. Hopefully, now I can speed up a bit in creating some of the assets.

Blender 2.8 UI - Very easy to read and when you hover your mouse over something, you get a tooltip explaining what that thing does. This might seem like a review but I wanted to share my views on Blender. Last year, Blender 2.8 was released and I have been watching its development every now and then to see how it compares to other 3D Modelling software. It's been popping up here and there on 80.lv and I found that there is a pivot painter addon for Blender. So I thought I'd finally try out Blender 2.8, after using it occasionally in my spare time. The software is INCREDIBLE! I more or less understood how the software worked. Everything was explained in the UI. I set the keyboard shortcuts to Industry compatible (a bit like Maya's navigation). 3D Cursor in Blender  - Always there in the way One thing that did bother me is the 3D Cursor. It feels really odd and always in the way. Does it really need to be there all the time? There is an option to hide it but I w