Google Cloud and Sony have recently teamed up to work on OpenCue, a new open-source render manager for VFX and animation. It is stated that OpenCue is based on Cue 3, the internal queuing system developed at Sony Pictures Imageworks over the last 15 years. It is also said that the system has been scaled to over 150,000 cores shared between Sony’s own on-premise data center and Google Cloud Platform (GCP) for recent projects. Then, two teams decided that it should be open-sourced and renamed OpenCue. “Sony’s strong history of developing software tools has made this an ideal partnership,” pointed out Todd Prives, GCP product manager, media & entertainment, in a blog post announcing the OpenCue release. “Sony has developed and contributed to industry standard software packages such as OpenColorIO and Alembic, which are now critical pieces in the pipeline of hundreds of…
Eugene Apekin and Oleg Ushenok have released their new pack that will let you spend less time modeling and more time dealing with your ideas. This sci-fi pack was created in Fusion 360 and 3ds Max. Please note that models are saved in MAX, OBJ and FBX files for import. The pack features 14 – Sci-fi Panels. Reselling these assets is not allowed, but other than that they are free to use for private and commercial projects. You can learn more here. Get the pack for $6+ © a.sergeev for 80lvl, 2019. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us Post tags: 3d art, 3DS Max, fusion 360, gamedev, indiedev Feed enhanced by Better Feed from Ozh
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Here is one of the posts that are just about our love for art. We love everything extraordinary and intricate, and we love sharing with you. Take a look at some stunning WIP renders set up by talented students of one particular Chinese academy. The works here have been created during this course on characters by students of Chao Dong and Cheng Xing. Let’s check out the works. You can find more works here. Please share other wonderful works in the comments below. © a.sergeev for 80lvl, 2019. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us Post tags: 3d art, gamedev, indiedev, render, ZBrush Feed enhanced by Better Feed from Ozh
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Sam Gao talked about his fan art environment based on Overwatch’s location Hanamura as well as painterly stylized art on the whole. Introduction Hello, My name is Sam Gao and I am from China/Australia. Currently, I reside in Sarasota, Florida, finishing my BFA in Game art and specializing in environment art. What attracted me into game development is the whole package of experiences. I enjoy almost every aspect of game art including character, VFX, sounds, and game design. Environment art is the combination of all these things and that’s why I am fascinated by it. Stylized Mountaintop Biome About The Project This project started as a cherry blossom themed environment with Mountain Fuji. Later, I transformed it into a Hanamura fanart because I was inspired by Overwatch’s interpretation of this classic imagery…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hmgQBWbLCfY
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Intel has revealed a new open source image denoiser called Open Image Denoise which is available under an Apache 2.0 license. It is said to feature several “high-performance, high-quality denoising filters for images rendered with ray tracing.” “The purpose of Open Image Denoise is to provide an open, high-quality, efficient, and easy-to-use denoising library that allows one to significantly reduce rendering times in ray tracing based rendering applications. It filters out the Monte Carlo noise inherent to stochastic ray tracing methods like path tracing, reducing the amount of necessary samples per pixel by even multiple orders of magnitude (depending on the desired closeness to the ground truth),” states the description. The tool is said to be compatible with Intel 64 architecture based CPUs and compatible architectures. The tool is powerful enough not only for offline rendering but also for interactive ray tracing as…
Mohamed Chahin talked about low poly artworks and shared the way he approaches his miniatures made in Blender. Introduction To quickly introduce myself, I’m Mohamed Chahin, an Art Director/3D artist from Alexandria, Egypt. I do all kinds of visuals and I’ve worked on a bunch of game projects, Branding for a few companies and a lot of illustrations for different brands. My path into 3D production started when a friend of mine and I were checking some work online and saw Jona Dinges’s art. I started learning 3D software solutions, watching tutorials endlessly, trying 3ds Max, C4D and Blender. Once I got my first render I started posting projects like crazy. Those were projects about everything: cities, vehicles, forests, dragons etc. That’s when I started doing freelance projects being in the 3rd year of college. As for the projects I’ve worked on, I made a…
Artyom Filippov shared his experience of attending the CGMA course The Art of Lighting and profound knowledge learned about self-development & self-education and working in the industry. Introduction Hi! My name is Artyom Filippov. For the last 2.5 years, I have been working as a Lead Level Designer and a Lighting Artist. Right now, at work, we are making a mobile game focusing on high-quality graphics. Consequently, the requirements for the art team are high, that is why I am always keen to learn new things and level-up. I realized that the more experience I accumulate, the less interesting educational content I can find. It’s getting harder to obtain new information from articles or videos. What’s curious, it relates both to free and paid content. It inspired me to enter the CGMA course The Art of Lighting under the guidance of…
[video src="https://www.filfre.net/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/UW1.mp4" poster="https://www.filfre.net/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/UW1.mp4"]I rarely play or even see current games; the demands of this historical project of mine simply don’t allow for it. Thankfully, though, being a virtual time traveler does have its advantages. Just when I’m starting to feel a little sorry for myself, having heard about some cool new release I just don’t have time for, I get to experience a game like Ultima Underworld the way a player from its own time would have seen it, and suddenly living in my bubble is worth it. It really is difficult to convey to non-time travelers just how amazing Ultima Underworld was back in March of 1992. To be able to move freely through a realistically rendered 3D space; to be able to walk up and down inclines, to jump over or into chasms, even to swim in underground streams……
Grinding Gear Games’ Path of Exile is a free-to-play success story which began as a modest story in 2013 and since then has been entertaining millions of active players every month. Want to learn about the development techniques behind the title? Don’t miss the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco next month then. As part of the GDC 2019 design talks Grinding Gear’s Chris Wilson will be hosting “Designing ‘Path of Exile’ To Be Played Forever“, which is basically an inside look at how Path was built. “He [Chris] will cover how to structure releases into seasons with predictable release dates and scope, how to re-use content for rapid development, how to use procedural generation to keep content from feeling stale, how to employ multiple overlapping axes of randomness for additional replayability, how to design deep gameplay systems that keep…
Don’t miss this chance to grab Particle Toolkit by Luos for free. It features a number of meshes, noise textures, material functions, vector fields and more for your VFX projects. It also comes with 67 example particles. Basically, the pack is a nice toolbox filled with all kinds of great content to create particles with. Contains: 67 Particle effects 200 textures that can be used for a variety of effects 11 flip-books 9 gradients 23 masks 38 RGB Channel Noise Textures 45 Normal maps for UV distortion 30 gray-scale noise textures 50+ textures of the random variety (sprites, noise, normal, detail, etc.) You can learn more here. Please note that not all the effects might be used in games as…
Alexander Kolyasa and Mark Kassikhin were kind enough to share a detailed breakdown of their astonishing Racer’s Shelter created in Unigine: working with references, advantages of the engine, modeling, texturing, setting up lighting, and more. Introduction Alexander: My name is Alexander Kolyasa, I’m 26 and I have the education of an architect. It’s where I got my first bits of knowledge about 3d. I got a bachelor degree, but I realized, that games are much more interesting for me. And in 2014 I got my first job at a small local game dev studio. However, I didn’t know anything about UVs, texturing or retopology at that time. As expected, I was expelled from the further education in my academy because I started going to work and not to classes, but I don’t regret that as I’ve found my passion! And now, for almost 5…
The leader of the Hoa team was kind enough to talk about the way they’re using the Ghibli style and mixing different elements to build a marvelous game in Unity. Introduction Our team consists of graduates from universities in Singapore (NTU and NUS). Currently, we have 4 members: 2 artists and 2 programmers. We are going to add another programmer and a composer to our lineup soon. All our members have a full time job, and work part time on Hoa in our spare time. Hoa is the first big project for all members of our team. Only me, Ryo, the team leader, have experience working in the game industry prior to this. Hoa started as my side project while working as an artist in the university’s gamelab. As the scale of the game slowly got bigger, I started recruiting friends…
Go grab this free tool for Unreal that adds support for exporting PNG files from textures in the content browser. Technical Details Features: Supports Gray and RGB(A) Formats Supports 8-bit and 16-bit Full source included. Lightweight Code Modules: ST_ExportPNGEditor [Editor – 2 Classes] Please note that the tool supports all development platforms. You can learn more here. Get the tool Landscape Auto Material by VEA Games is a flexible auto-painting material for Unreal Engine 4 Landscape component. When you are drawing the topology of your landscape, proper material layers are drawn automatically! Check the full feature list Contact VEA Games © a.sergeev for 80lvl, 2019. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us Post tags: 3d art, Epic Games, Game Design, gamedev, indiedev, UE4, Unreal Engine Feed enhanced…
via The AI of Horizon Zero Dawn | Part 1: Rise of the Machines | AI and Games – YouTube
Dreams has been a long time coming, and of course, when developer Media Molecule announced that they’re going to be running a closed beta, people were excited to see exactly what is possible with this title. We started seeing the developers tease some projects during live streams, but then we started seeing NDA’s being broken, one of the most noteworthy breaks was the P.T level recreated in the beta. Even the developers at Media Molecule have been getting hands-on with the beta and creating their own designs. One being John Beech who created a realistic Pool simulator using the beta version of Dreams using AI that’s still a work in progress. The level apparently took 20-30 hours to create according to the user ‘Project Genesis‘ who recorded themselves playing the developers level. You’ll find the video embedded below and it’s really quite a looker. The game features…
A portion of the book cover for The Abominable Snowman by R.A. Montgomery. (credit: ChooseCo) The classic children’s book series Choose Your Own Adventure is now an interactive Amazon Alexa skill, available today. The release is a partnership between Amazon-owned Audible and ChooseCo, the current owner of the Choose Your Own Adventure brand. Founded in 2003 by R.A. Montgomery and Shannon Gilligan, ChooseCo has printed new editions of Choose Your Own Adventure books over the years. In the new Alexa skill, the story will be read to you, and then Alexa will beep whenever a choice that branches the narrative comes up. You just speak the choice to proceed. It also comes with a few simple commands to help you navigate. Critically, and in the spirit of how kids read the books back in the day, you can say…
The question everyone asked has been answered; yes, you can make a lightsaber in Dreams. And you can wield it with a PlayStation Move controller too. Reddit user magnumninja recently shared a look at his version of the iconic Star Wars sword. It was built in the ongoing creator beta for Dreams. The developer created a pretty solid green saber, but Move control allows you to wield it like Luke Skywalker himself. Crucially, magnumninja says this is the first step in plans to build out a Star Wars VR level. The Dreams beta doesn’t have VR support, but it does allow everyone to get to grips with the tools. As far as we understand, VR levels will have to be built within VR itself. magnumninja is considering building out a first-person ‘Jedi Academy-like’ like level for PSVR….